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“... in the shell itself. This is what the Disney Corporation Inc. had done to all the legends: Snow White, Pinocchio, even Huckleberry Finn.’ So much for the Magic Kingdom. In Australia, the heroine encounters the opposition of entrenched conservatism, which she combats in a healthy spirit of give and take. On her return, the deluge has fallen on ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... hard lessons of experience. Practically every house he purchased turned at once into an untameable white elephant. But his ill-luck with real estate was as nothing compared to his experience with motor cars. He seems to have got himself involved in an accident every time he ventured onto the road; so frequent were his traffic mishaps that he became convinced ...”

“... These attacks have been concerted, populist and unfair. They have been led by the Home Secretary, Michael Howard (a frequent and bad loser in the courts), and the Chairman of his Party, Brian Mawhinney, who has urged Tory hangers and floggers to write in and complain about lenient sentencing on the part of judges, and has put out as party propaganda a ...”

“... the social ladder. ‘The West India interest was not just a handful of planters and merchants,’ Michael Taylor writes in the final paragraph of his excellent new book, The Interest, but involved ‘hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, businessmen, financiers, landowners, clergymen, intellectuals, journalists, publishers, sailors, soldiers and judges, and ...”

“... beyond 1441 was needed, suppressing the contrary opinion of Goldsmith and of the FCO legal adviser Michael Wood. A month later Straw stopped Goldsmith giving advice (Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary, told the inquiry that ‘it would have been better’ if Goldsmith’s advice had been obtained earlier). Further meetings took place, without records being ...”

“... touch. The British diplomatic records – pink telegrams from the Foreign Office to its outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote ...”

“... are accused of breaking those laws.’ It was the DC district court that subpoenaed Nixon for his White House tape recordings and which tried and sentenced the men who broke into the Watergate complex on his behalf.Attorneys from the Department of Justice’s unit for prosecuting ‘Capitol Breach’ cases have filed into the district courtrooms almost every ...”

“... of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.’ Affinities ...”

“... which, astonishingly, transposes and inverts the passage in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that describes the meeting between Hartright and Maria Halcombe – also made ‘ugly’ by facial hair. Edith’s grace is attained only in death: an unexpectedly romantic conclusion with which Kleist would have sympathised. P.J. Kavanagh’s Only by ...”

“... into chunks of a sensible size – something which very few snakes can manage (an exception is the white-bellied mangrove snake, which twists the legs off crabs for more convenient swallowing). The evolutionary loss of limbs means that the snake’s head cannot afford the heavy bones, teeth and musculature required for this sort of feeding: indeed, the head ...”

“... keeping’. Bishop Wordsworth, great-nephew of the poet, is commemorated by George Frampton in white marble, supine, fingers intertwined as though sleeping off a heavy lunch. He is almost as dead as the supposedly living figures painted by Frampton’s son, Meredith, now in the Tate’s collection. They are minutely detailed simulacra of humans that look ...”

“... along with the menace of unregulated nanotechnology, which Gibson was on to long before Michael Crichton and Prince Charles. As his settings have moved closer to the present, though, his plots have mutated from dark conspiracies into Elmore Leonard-ish capers. The tone has become sunnier: fewer good guys are killed off, and the hero usually ends up ...”

“... a friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was ...”

“... in 1845, the result of a private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating coal-tar derivatives, aniline in particular. He had also speculated that ...”