“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... Major was again in the right place, as the only plausible Thatcherite contender who could beat Michael Heseltine. Whether Thatcher really thought him the right man to succeed her was now beside the point, though it became a matter of continuing recrimination. The ambiguity in Major’s position at first helped him. ‘I am not running as son of Margaret ...”

“... elucidate, that accounts for its lasting presence. She is a daughter of a king of Colchis on the Black Sea, a princess from a country beyond the bounds of civilisation as the Greeks saw it. The golden fleece (of a magical sacrificed ram) is the sacred cult object of her country, guarded by terrible fire-breathing monsters (a colossal snake or a dragon ...”

“... Diana’s death and funeral was to keep up this pose while rescuing the Palace from the spectre of black republicanism, in the face of both a snarling press and a po-faced sovereign who couldn’t see what the fuss was about. By the end of the week, though, Number Ten had convinced even Her Majesty that without a sop to sentiment this could be the Big One, and ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... but the harm and suffering that one inflicts upon oneself.’ The narrator centres her lecture on Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, in which a repressed piano teacher, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is pursued by a ‘cocky and dashing student’. She proposes a sadomasochistic scenario, is rejected as ‘repugnant’ and then stabs herself in her ...”

“... focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a plain design, black on grey. Memorials are small incidents of civic amnesia, a way of letting go. If you place such a thing on a high wall, nobody sees it. I’d worked, years ago, shifting sacks of Christmas mail, at Liverpool Street, King’s Cross and St Pancras, but I had ...”

“... critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a memoir, originally published in Vanity Fair, called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). It was an instant bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my ...”

“... books furnished Hollywood with five very successful films – Scaramouche, Captain Blood, The Black Swan, which won an Academy Award, and two versions of The Sea Hawk. As indicated by these titles, or even more by the name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art ...”

“... concerned middle classes and the greens. Throw in women (end ‘the culture of masculinity’), black people (‘Labour didn’t listen’), the Irish (‘troops out’) and a good dose of anti-Americanism (Europe has been ‘made in the USA’), and the coalition is complete. Labour is ready to win. There is something fetching about the simplicity of ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... and supported by a single word or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction’ (Black); the contextual ‘suggests that a search of the context of each metaphor yields ... a set of clues relevant to its interpretation.’ Having reviewed them all. Scheffler rightly emphasises the creative or exploratory role of metaphor. The book is slightly ...”

“... to know the truth drives him on in the face of orders to abandon it. He has stumbled on a black secret of the Reich which, if spilled, could put an end to all talk of a détente with America. As he pursues his investigation, taking more and more risks but getting away with them, you begin to think that the evil old state founded on denunciation and ...”