“... in a sandstorm, croaking out: ‘Follow the money.’ Bernstein and Woodward’s subsequent story took months to run its course, requiring as it did double-sourcing, deep analysis, painstaking consultation with lawyers as to publishability, judicious interplay between ‘reporting’ and ‘editorialising’. What has made the change, of course, is the ...”

“... The myth that Mars presented the distant spectacle of a dead or dying mighty civilisation took firm root with the popularising theories of Percival Lowell, at the turn of the century. It was bad astronomy, but excellent inspiration for romancers. Among Martian fantasies inspired by the ‘canals’, the most famous is Wells’s War of the Worlds ...”

“... that it remains a discipline more than an art.) During breaks from A la Recherche, Scott-Moncrieff took refuge in the altogether shorter and more urgent sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like ...”

“... be mightily deceived.’ Both Andropov’s election and his radical impact as General Secretary took observers by surprise. One reason was that the initial image of a ruthless secret police chief presented in the Western media was an inadequate summary of his political record and a misleading guide to his likely behaviour in office. The biographies by ...”

“... the same thing in the opposite way, among corpses rather than lively bodies. But Whitman, who took to Poe at once and liked his work, had a dark side too, and a sensuous passion for the dead and their graves, for night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his Boswell, interrogated Whitman about events in ...”

“... own kind of respectability. As distinctions and divisions crumbled in her imagination, her style took on an ever more compelling and more goblinesque accuracy. Her imagination had always centred less on Ireland than on the South Coast of England, where she had spent her girlhood, and in her last two novels place takes on a vividness at once hallucinatory and ...”

“... to Freud – was unable or unwilling to understand this strange turn of events, whereas Freud took thought and concluded that Breuer’s patient had transferred onto her doctor emotions originally felt for but never expressed to someone else (her father). The aborted exchange between Dr Breuer and the pseudonymous Anna O. was thus the true matrix of ...”

“... its long history, but the Italians couldn’t be considered the most serious of them. The battle took place in the highlands of the northern province of Tigray and began shortly before dawn on 1 March 1896. The Ethiopians had mobilised 120,000 men against a mixed force of 19,000 Italians and locally recruited colonial troops known as askari. Such numerical ...”

“... easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office. It was a view shared by much of the New Labour administration. The law is the servant, they believed, of our duly elected political masters. It is what they say it is and what ...”

“... to Greek debt: can’t pay, won’t pay. The vote on the latest round of austerity measures took place in the middle of a 48-hour general strike. The Indignati are not stupid, and are well aware of two salient points. First, the ‘bailouts’, as they are always called, are no such thing. Taxpayer-funded capital injections into otherwise bankrupt banks ...”

“... but also a sense of dissatisfaction with how little we still know about how the killings actually took place. As Pohl notes, prior to his work, the only studies on occupied Poland concerned Warsaw. Gerlach’s is the first detailed work to have appeared on the Holocaust in Belarus. But though they add valuable perspectives, the new studies do not add up to a ...”

“... everybody else was doing, so that there was too much traffic for the line to handle. And then, it took only one call to end it. There was a spate of e-mail, too, a lot of it from strangers offering guidelines on new ways to park, new methods of walking across a carpark. One unsigned set of instructions began: ‘As you already know I have been a Swat Sniper ...”

“... starting points. Names, too, are less fragile than buildings. There is evidence that some changes took place very quickly. The speed of rebuilding after the Great Fire was phenomenal. The spread of London westwards in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. ...”

“... out’ for generations: the deaths of heirs, a fondness for cards and catastrophic marriages all took their toll. But after 1918, with the loss of so many men and the accumulation of death duties, it seemed that the end really was nigh. Hundreds of country houses were put up for sale that year. Less expectedly they sold in unprecedented numbers and for ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”