“... presented; the brief preliminary introduction to each is sensible, as is the annotation at the foot of the page, and the bibliographical commentary that closes the volumes. This is in most ordinary ways a wonderful collection of Coleridge’s poems, and the two books of plays are a thoroughly useful addition. Beyond this, there are problems. Many are ...”

“... Among the critics of Obama’s policies towards the auto industry is the Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the longest serving member of the House, and a long-time ally of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. ‘I’m troubled by the different treatment of auto companies … and the treatment of those good-hearted people such as AIG and all ...”

“... when it came to easel painting with intellectual credibility. Paint serious, paint big! An 11-foot-tall Democritus in Meditation (presently in Copenhagen) was unveiled, littered with skulls, moonstruck clouds and carefully researched antique curios. Ricciardi, the writer friend who had supplied the erudition, was plugged for further themes: ‘Now that ...”

“... Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as it had taken Alas to write. ‘Translation is a strange ...”

“... far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy godmother, both shot by Tim Walker. From this side of the ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... their own glory or catastrophe. The stories hang together well, the odd man out being Corporal John Ledyard, a marine, of Groton, Connecticut. (Another Boy’s Own boy: Thomas Jefferson encouraged him to walk from Siberia to Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, and on to Virginia. He was arrested at Irkutsk and returned to the Polish border; later he was ...”

“... and injustices on excessive state interference in free market mechanisms – the ‘visible foot’ stamping on the ‘invisible hand’. His son, a tall young man with a long ponytail, joined us. I asked him what he did, and he replied with a grin: ‘I am a muckraker.’ He went on to explain that he was a journalist on one of the bold new ...”

“... material of the book could just as well have formed the basis of a very different sort of work. John Betjeman picked up on this odd and wholly characteristic ambivalence when he wrote to congratulate him: ‘When I read the book it seemed to me so rockingly funny that nothing else would seem funny again.’Decline and Fall is one of a number of Waugh’s ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... it instead, colliding with the air molecules in its path at a pressure of about 2lb per square foot. The assaulted air shook, and gave up the dose of extra energy as sound. Concorde climbed on, dragging its sack of reverberating noise behind. There is, of course, no such thing as the sound barrier. What there is, is the aerodynamic challenge of the ...”

“... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...”

“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”