“... mesh chair in his headset, he’ll be reminded by large electronic screens on the wall striped green, amber or red how well he and his colleagues are doing in responding to and handling calls. The standards change but they create both time and emotional pressure: T. is supposed to answer and deal with whatever arises after a call is finished within a ...”

“... on the top and Tesco bags full of paper underneath. Harrow has a system of compulsory recycling: green bins for paper, cans, bottles, and brown bins for organic waste, which includes garden waste and leftover food. People in Harrow who mix the stuff up, or ‘contaminate’, have their rubbish left uncollected, and must pay £20 to get it picked up, after ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... appeared in 2013. The last chapter of the book, based on nine years of research by its authors, David Shields and Shane Salerno, claimed that at least five books were finished when Salinger died: a collection of Glass stories, a book about the Indian philosophical-religious tradition of Vedanta, a novel about Salinger’s strange marriage to a German woman ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... but the ship itself was realised by others. In Glasgow, John Robertson made the engine and David Napier the boiler, while John Wood in Port Glasgow built the wooden hull and installed the machinery. The result was a marvel, the prototype of a steamer fleet that would revolutionise travel on the Clyde by 1820, when two dozen of them sailed every day ...”

“... which he exercises over their Counsels.’ Olcott made contact with a young Buddhist called Don David Hewavitarane, who took the name Anagarika Dharmapala (‘homeless protector of the Dharma’). Dharmapala’s status in Sri Lanka today is comparable with Gandhi’s in India, but though they were of the same generation, Dharmapala’s anti-Western ideas ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... On the one hand: well, Semiotext(e) in the 1980s, ooh la la. Chris calls Guattari ‘Félix’; David Byrne is doing the music at Joseph Kosuth’s 50th birthday party, which gets written up the next day in the New York Post. ‘You think we’re decadent sophisticates,’ they write to Dick at one point, faux indignant, going on to explain that they’re ...”

“... real features of the living world. Some of the best recent work on this topic has been done by David Queller and Joan Strassmann, of Washington University in St Louis, in their studies of insects and of stranger beasts, such as tiny amoebas which join to form crawling colonies. Queller and Strassmann classify systems using two dimensions, co-operation and ...”

“... Marthe Bibesco, whom he got to know better. Runciman asked this other princess ‘with huge green eyes … well-suited to the brush of Boldini’ if she would show him Romania and his letter of thanks after that visit strikes a rare note of sincerity and gratitude for ‘three weeks of enjoyment and interest such as I have never experienced ...”

“... intelligence from 1997 to 2007. His story made it into bookshops (Son of Hamas) and cinemas (The Green Prince). Human rights organisations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip report evidence of Palestinians killed, tortured or jailed, by both official and unofficial Palestinian bodies, for collaborating with Israel. When I worked at Physicians for Human ...”

“... clarified me to myself,’ Ammons told him in 1970). Yet when Ammons assented to David Lehman’s interpretation in an interview for the Paris Review (‘I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you had been’), one senses mischief. ‘Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently ...”

“... he seemed to me towering – and sexy, with a perfectly developed sense of humour and expressive green eyes. He and I had a rapport, no sex but much sharing of confidences. When the Cleavers arrived, I was working at the Ministry of Information organising the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, which was to bring together musicians, dancers, actors and ...”