“... direct language would do. There’s so much space in them that they seem to hang in the air like crystal mobiles, fragile and scintillating. The smudgy harmonies and almost modal shape of the melodies makes them sound as if derived from an unidentifiable musical tradition: people suggested ancient Greek; Venusian might have been closer. Debussy, whom Satie ...”

“... by mathematicians interested in algorithms for generating such things, by chemists investigating crystal structure, and by psychologists concerned with the way the mind makes sense of the external world, but for Penrose they were, for the most part, a bit of fun.The puzzles that have preoccupied Penrose, though, belong to other cultural domains, and form the ...”

“... because he foresaw no alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution. Marx puts great pressure on the question of where value comes from, how commodities are exchanged and what money is. It’s a very simple question but not one that had been asked with such clarity ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... secession war in 1993 (another $600,000 was intercepted before he could pay it into his account). David Mirtskhulava, the former minister of energy, had a mild heart attack when he was charged with pocketing $6 million on its way to pay Georgia’s bill for electricity imports. Georgia is not a sprawling continent, but a poor, steep country about the same ...”

“... Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.I ...”

“... immediately they encounter supernatural beings, a shapeshifting witch and a wizard – the ‘crystal, shaped like a raindrop’ on Susan’s bracelet is a magical object sought after by the forces of good and evil in their struggle for dominion. If originality was a requirement, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen would be marked down for its strong whiff of ...”

“... of evil spirits and the invocation of angeli boni – Dee brought out his ‘shew stone’, or crystal ball. The soi-disant Talbot ‘then settled himself to the Action … and within one quarter of an hour (or less) he had sight of one in the stone’. The angel identified itself as Uriel. It ‘spake plainly’, in a mixture of Latin and English, ‘to ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... George Clinton said on the title track, ‘but that’s a temporary condition, too.’In 1975, David Clarke, a white civil rights lawyer on the city council, introduced a proposal to decriminalise marijuana possession. He pointed out that marijuana arrests had increased by 900 per cent, that 80 per cent of those arrested were black, and that these arrests ...”

“... a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had ...”

“... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...”

“... rise in the price of fuel could kill many of them off.’Before leaving I had rung a pig farmer, David Barker, whose farm is north of Stowmarket in Suffolk. Barker is 50 years old. His family has been farming pigs in Suffolk for four generations; they have lived and worked on the present farm since 1957. He owns 1250 acres and 110 sows, which he breeds and ...”

“... the person overshadowing the party. For the best American scholar on contemporary Brazil, David Samuels, it is the other way round: the deeper, more durable phenomenon was petismo – the party rather than the person. Lula, in his view, was not a charismatic leader like Vargas, or his heirs from Rio Grande do Sul, João Goulart or Leonel ...”