“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson), but also linked to other Yale critics, notably Harold Bloom, Peter Brooks, Geoffrey Hartman and Fredric Jameson. In the decades since then, Miller’s work has continued to evolve, often along paths marked out by Derrida. (Derrida moved from Yale to Irvine in California when Miller moved there in the mid-1980s.) In such ...”

“... street – and she wanted her picture taken. Two Chinooks were overhead as I made my way to see Peter Crowley, the Unicef representative in Afghanistan. They passed over the compound and disappeared into Camp Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with ...”

“... pages put out by the same newspaper on 15 April 1998, in response to the box-office success of James Cameron’s film. The large print captions are devoted to the ‘notable passengers’ and ‘noted men’ on board the ship, and there are extended quasi-obituaries of many of them. But the Times also made an effort to record the names of all the missing ...”

“... questionable practices, such as ‘soft commissions’ to brokers (i.e. kickbacks), that have led Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican senator from Illinois, to describe the savings industry as ‘the world’s largest skimming organisation’. Pension boards should also carry out their own research, something commercial fund managers too often leave to ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... Parliament and involved riots and pamphlet wars; eventually, it led to such songs and poems as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ and Robert Burns’s ‘A Parcel of Rogues’. A digital search shows that the words ‘Scots’ and ‘Scotland’ occur nowhere in the London-published 1707 Affairs of State. This tells us something more important about ...”

“... hygiene was so extreme that some of the women believed it must be a power thing. A few knew him as Peter, others as Craig or John. One woman had him in her phone as Blue Van Man. Shown ranks of photographs by detectives, however, the women all pointed to the same man. His name was Iain Packer. He knew Emma, they told the police. He’d had sex with her ...”

“... one beside the town hall and a second several blocks west. ‘At about 7.30,’ one of them, Peter Blake, remembered, ‘a roar went through the crowd, emanating from the rear. People turned and looked westwards down the street. I saw, to my amazement, a coach being driven fast straight into the back of the crowd. It was a private coach, an ordinary ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”

“... later played down the importance of his partnership with Ronson. In The Man Who Sold the World, Peter Doggett quotes from an interview with Melody Maker at the beginning of 1976 (though you can’t really trust anything Bowie said in that period): ‘I honestly can’t remember Mick that well these days,’ he said. ‘He’s just like any other band member ...”

“... wrapped up in themselves; and so it is nice to learn from Reid that the young Hughes loved James Thurber. ‘Alright, have it your way: you heard a seal bark,’ exasperated wife complains to anxious husband in the marital bed, while from behind the headboard a seal, unseen by both, looks attentively at something we shall never see. Thurber’s ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”