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“... Dawn darkness is a bare blue light and there’s a sound coming at you, most likely brought on the wind from a hillside forest or nicked off the skim of the sea . . . So you’re humming that long, slow note as you broach the day, and the dogs of dawn are all one voice as you step down from your home sweet home, your tour de folie, and before you get to the other side of the gate comes a smash and clatter of wings as a thing takes flight from a point just above your head and has you pinned by joy-in-fear as its lift-off shakes from the Tree of Love and Forgetting something much like a fruit that sits, just so, in the cup of your hand, though it would take a bigger fool than you to bite into that honeyed rump, as if you hadn’t sinned enough, as if you wouldn’t have to pay your share for each day of solitude, each night when your dreams of flight and falling left you stunned ...”

“... what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred ...”

“... projectionist (‘SS-man Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry ...”

“... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... bars by a factor of 400 just so that the remaining uncertainties can be made visible on the page. David Weintraub’s new book, How Old Is the Universe?, captures the spirit of this post-lonely-hearts era. Weintraub, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, offers a patient tour of the new data-rich landscape. Where Overbye had focused on the outsized ...”

“... there. The two most familiar images of the men express the contrast eloquently. First, there is David’s brilliant portrait of Napoleon on his rearing charger in the Alps, seemingly master of the wind, rocks and sky; second, Chateaubriand’s acid description of Talleyrand hobbling into the presence of Louis XVIII with the help of Napoleon’s sinister ...”

“... But arrive like this: a sudden shadow on the washed-out fleur-de-lis that paper the breakfast room; a form half-hidden by some other form, the angle of a door, perhaps, unless I think to make it a shutter, half-open, by which I leave you a single arm, single eye, single breast, a single link of the scallop- and-anchor motif on your sun-top, except that I can’t quite get it at this point, from just this viewpoint; or else crop up as someone walking away from the terrace in a moment’s downpour, when reflections bring the trees indoors and start you again from your place beside the shutter, setting off bravely from a house of rain, not even half-visible, now, then barely visible at all, then gone ...”

“... Her sudden, silent prayer was commonplace: to betray but do no harm, to admix guilt with love and that way get the best of it, to let each salty lie roll on her tongue, to gamble with heartbreak, to give an account of herself that would seem most like herself.   There’s a shadow in from under the door. Can you see it yet: shadow of slow-onset, contagion’s mission-creep ...”

“... has the suddenness of current film. Each image is stunning while it lasts. Snapshots of people: ‘David was a fireman, whose prematurely white hair give him a kind but slightly overdressed look, like a professional snooker player.’ Of animals (a mortally injured cat): ‘The eye on that side had been pushed in, causing it to turn and lift its head irritably ...”

“... not built until 1929, but neither its architectural style nor its date of construction dissuaded David Lean from using it in Lawrence of Arabia: little more than Jack Hawkins and a few khaki figures was needed to transform it into Britain’s Cairo ...”

“... the aggrandising behaviour of Liam Fox at the newly created Department for International Trade. David Davis at the newly created Department for Exiting the European Union is unhappy with both of them. This kind of turf warfare will only get worse as the time for invoking Article 50 draws near. It will put huge strain on the Tories’ united front. But who ...”

“... music from which you take your cue.*A working model of the fall from grace, a back-lit auto-da-fé, the lastof the species, caught and caged. It’s a raree show: Iscariot’s fallen tear,the Devil’s burlesque, something both fur and fin … and then the restone by one as the handle’s cranked – what you both love and fear.*Pain as quittance, pain as ...”

“... fythynesse, rust, menstrue, swylle, mannys durt, adders egges, the brede of lyes …                                                                                  Johan Bayle The firebug rises whistling from the fire. Slats laid on the overlap, branches at a pitch, as for Anne Askew wordless under torture, so broken the hangman’s crew carried her to the stake, a seat where she sat astride ...”

“... The Hammock Your book is Summer by Edith Wharton. A smell off the garden of something becoming inedible. Between sleeping and waking, no real difference at all. There’s music in this, there would have to be: a swell of strings and bells becoming inaudible, note by note, before you latch on to it . . . The girl in the story won’t prosper, that’s easy enough to tell ...”