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“... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...”

“... Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad ...”

“... which in turn makes it easier for Kaplan to cling onto his craggy overview, with its prophetic foot-holds in demographics, criminality and the ruin of nations. The second lesson is that what didn’t happen to you, the foreigner, has already happened, or is about to happen, to one or more of the nationals. A half-hearted mortar attack on the head of ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... them and nothing in the future, with Rogers thinking about living in the USA and his partner John Young looking into minicab driving, the RIBA asked them to submit material for consideration by an unnamed client. Lloyd’s were looking for an architect. They needed, not just space, but a plan which would allow business to go on while building ...”

“... equally common opposite, the bland, disembodiedly sensitive or namby-pamby verse that never puts a foot wrong, or right; both add, supererogatorily, to the stock of available unreality. The poetry of civility, passion and order is the true antithesis of both. Certainly there is plenty of boring verse around: there always has been. But it may be worth dwelling ...”

“... drank until my thirst was assuaged. After that I cut the shoe and tied its uppers on my foot with the rope off the well and bits of cloth.’ All this was before the days of Willis and Geiger and other suppliers of ‘strong shoes for walking’, but there’s a parable here for the modern hiker, to do with divesting yourself of the thing you hold ...”

“... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...”

“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... Airport in business class, and return to Paris or Düsseldorf three days later without having set foot in any part of India other than Gurgaon. It is this world that Adiga sets out to dissect in the most ambitious part of the book. Balram lives in the servants’ apartments in Buckingham Towers B Block. It is, as he describes it, part of a ‘warren of ...”

“... storeys up, a captain in a smart grey wool coat sat behind a big desk in a corner office watching John Travolta in Be Cool. At least he had turned up for work; much of the Libyan police force now exists only on paper. A colonel in the internal intelligence service told me that he, and every other high-ranking officer he knows, shows up once a week to pick up ...”

“... an exemption from the arcane law against cross-dressing; for her grandest composition, the 17-foot long Horse Fair, she attended the equine auctions near the Salpêtrière on Wednesdays and Saturdays, always disguised as a man. Unveiled at the Salon of 1853, Horse Fair was hailed as a ‘picture of the century’; it toured widely in Britain and the ...”

“... system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set foot in Egypt in 1828, on an expedition sponsored by the Duke of Tuscany, and felt ‘as if he had come home’. His ‘swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native’, Wilkinson writes, echoing Champollion’s own claim to ...”