“... she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... on this), whose triumphant entry into Jerusalem she would accompany as his ‘Queen’, riding a white horse and up to her waist ‘in blood’. Hence the dominant image of her as ‘poor mad Hester’. Successive biographers – and there have been a number of them, though curiously Kirsten Ellis doesn’t mention the last and best, Lorna Gibb – have ...”

“... But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the jailed – are some of the book’s most striking details. (The broad outline of the abuses Slahi suffered, even the worst ones, has been a matter of ...”

“... Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is cultural, including the Andes ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 for ...”

“... the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir (the US testing tsar) and the White House task force (two guys sharing a bedsit in San Francisco). We suggested to executives at Apple that we could regularly test all ten thousand employees at their UFO-shaped building near San Jose. Great idea, they replied. We talked to Anne Wojcicki, the ...”

“... would go on to have thirteen Rolls-Royces and many houses. His gold medal is now owned by Michael Flatley.If I am on the road to the airport, and getting ready to be an Irish writer abroad, I might think of Seamus Heaney, who lived near the strand, and once joked that his family only saw him walk it when he had a film crew in tow. This cluster ...”

“... a little thunderous, but not to the point of Mannerism, nor are his figures as stagey-grotesque as Michael Ayrton’s were. His line and colour are tart – compared with illustrations commissioned for cookery books today, almost brutal – but the world they create is welcoming. Before market research quantified the effectiveness of commercial art, and fine ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... me. Everywhere dog shit dogs must have important freedom to shit everywhere. With a flash of wide white cuff, he taps the page of figures on Harry’s desk. Too much disorder. Too much dog shit. Pay by end of August, no prosecution for criminal activities. But no more Toyota franchise at Singer Motors. Japanese perplexity awakening to contempt dismisses ...”

“... His sentences are as pungent and as full of character as his music’ etc) and as described by Michael Tanner in the letter pages of this journal as ‘the greatest English prose of our time, I think’ (LRB, 3-16 February 1983), is Craft’s prose. Craft’s essayistic prose is indistinguishable from what is ostensibly Stravinsky’s in his answers to ...”

“... who speaks of ‘a witness to the truth, not of God, but of our unwillingness for God’: reading Michael Edwards’s statement in multi-racial Britain in 1985, I wonder at its exclusive, ethnically-biased use of ‘our’ and ‘God’. Edwards employs the words in a manner which assumes the existence of a white Christian ...”

“... on the cricket field goes unpunished. Warne tends to agree with them. Many other players – from Michael Atherton to Sachin Tendulkar – have been accused of messing around with the ball and got away with it. Some, like the South Africans Faf du Plessis and Vernon Philander, have been penalised for ball-tampering without, as Warne says, being ‘vilified ...”