“... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... Everyone is in high spirits. Among those chattering girlishly as spring rolls and won ton arrive: Young but already world-famous deconstructionist literary critic, long involved in a lesbian relationship with an older professor at Yale. Somewhat mannish, chain-smoking medievalist of mysterious inclinations, with whom Famous ...”

“... writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language skills, short on introspection. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, ‘he would bludgeon, set traps, ambush and trip up. His manner, which did little to disguise that he thought he was cleverer than most people, left many of his ...”

“... over the broken ground. Here and there were captured enemy, or ‘suspects’ at least, wiry young men in sandals and shabby black work-clothes (or uniforms?), some wounded and bandaged, others sullenly unhurt, their arms tied tightly behind their backs. The ones I saw were being guarded, not by Americans, but by brown-skinned ARVN soldiers, men of their ...”

“... That book is fused with my being in a way that happens only with things encountered when one is young and growing like one of our hero’s magic trees. Even now, even as I find the book silly and boring and rather noisome (to use a word from J.R.R.’s special vocabulary), it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. There is suction, something ...”

“... and so on. Of her rash on Sunday the SI investigator said to us: ‘This is about a rash in a young woman who was profoundly unwell, had sepsis that was unexplained, high fever, low blood pressure, racing heart – in context, those things by themselves are enough for admission to a high dependency facility. The rash on top of that … just goes to ...”

“... worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time when I was young.It was strange, being able to imagine the rooms in which Beegan had lived – or, more accurately, since I never went into a locked ward when I was a child, the corridors he walked to get from the ward to the art studio and back. I remembered those ...”

“... reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The book he is ...”

“... was pioneered. To make the first machine to mass produce polyethylene cups, Harry Craven, a young craftsman who worked for Charnley, scavenged odds and ends from a local scrapyard. In their book A Transatlantic History of Total Hip Replacement Julie Anderson, Francis Neary and John Pickstone argue that by putting ...”

“... father as he grows older, in the process getting to look less like Raymond Huntley and more like Francis L. Sullivan and ‘the sort of person that democracy doesn’t suit’.Larkin’s choice of profession is unsurprising because from an early age libraries had been irresistible. ‘I was an especially irritating kind of borrower, who brought back in the ...”

“... an eye or an ear the only human thing left. The one other person in the room with us was a pale young man in a windbreaker, one of the Four Horsemen on his day off. He was busy taking photos of the photos and smiling delightedly.We passed next through a kind of garage with rusty stuff piled all around – shell casings, barbed wire, rotting Sam Browne ...”

“... on Ukraine his bitter post-Soviet fantasy of revanchism. ‘The spirit of 1989 remains alive,’ Francis Fukuyama declared in the Financial Times, but we must ‘constantly struggle’ for the ‘existing liberal order’. As it happens, emulation of the American way of being in the world is largely complete with Putin’s shock and awe assault, which ...”

“... share price based on the number of letters they’d posted over their lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher ...”

“... in court, she spoke of the importance of the maternal bond: ‘I don’t think it’s fair on a young baby not to experience that … she needed to be with her family as long as possible.’ She explained that they were convinced they needed to keep moving in order to avoid local authority jurisdiction over their daughter. This was the reason they were on a ...”