“... They could have picked Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing Arkansas radio preacher – ‘I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe in them, too’ – and former governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ...”

“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... Alix was intolerant: Klein, she said, ‘dances like an elephant’ – a severe handicap when the major preoccupation in Twenties Berlin was party-going. Alix clearly found vulgar Klein’s penchant for dressing up for these parties ‘as a kind of Cleopatra – terrifically décolletée – and covered in bangles and rouge’ and for being ‘frightfully ...”

“... led to several investigations into an alleged shoot to kill policy, the most notable headed by John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Manchester. Stalker’s inquiry was continually obstructed by elements within the RUC and he was eventually, and very controversially, dismissed from the police. The findings of his inquiry were never published. ‘I ...”

“... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...”

“... led to Thorpe’s disgrace and departure, and then to a bitter contest for the succession with John Pardoe, gave David Steel an almost impossible task. He was 39, but looked younger, a slight figure with an easy smile, a son of the Scottish manse, neither obviously at home with scholars, like Grimond, or in London society, like Thorpe. ‘The boy ...”

“... at different moments of time and in different places during individual development, then we have a major problem of dissection on our hands. (No matter how tirelessly Australian chemists can break down a wine into 540 essences, they will never re-create the natural time-dependent processes of a French grape – unfortunately.) Pollack prefers to see the genome ...”

“... book’), spinner of literary pranks and fancies. This wealthy schoolboy who never grew up was a major reader of major writers, an intelligent prefacer and – an inspired variation on the Vichy theme – an unflagging literary collaborator: he translated Arnold Bennett, Butler, Coleridge, Landor and Whitman, championed ...”

“... and finally to expand that notion of interaction into the genres of autobiographies.’ In 1993, John Sturrock could say in The Language of Autobiography: ‘there has never yet been an autobiography addressed to a readership of literary theorists.’ Now it looks as if that time is upon us. The general reader, it seems, is left out of the loop, save as ...”

“... patterns. He pinpoints the birth of traumatic memory to a machine-made disaster, the train crash. John Erichsen was perhaps the first physician to describe the syndrome in the 1860s while examining victims of British railway accidents; he called it ‘railway spine’, and attributed it to vaguely defined neurological mechanisms that originated in dorsal ...”

“... the (increasingly elderly?) fans who clamber from their charabancs for matinée productions of Major Barbara or The Doctor’s Dilemma have more cause to be grateful to GBS than they know. After all, thanks to the existence of public lavatories for women, the fans can settle back for two or three hours of facile paradox and wholly unmemorable epigram, safe ...”

“... by not moving. He remains upright amid the ruins of a Keynesian political economy while the two major parties quarrel over possession of the new orthodoxy. He has also written one of the best things on Thatcherism: Dancing with Dogma (1992), a book which will demonstrate to a later generation that not all Conservative politicians took leave of their senses ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... and Hispanic voters to turn out in unprecedented numbers. He did better among white voters than John Kerry had in 2004, but not by much: Kerry got 41 per cent, Obama 43 per cent. The brunt of the recession has been borne by precisely those groups that supported Obama most: blacks, Hispanics and the young. (In 2008, the 18-29 age group, which usually ...”

“... with a powerful editorial board and a team of learned commentators. One volume apiece goes to the major novels – Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which originally appeared in a single posthumous volume, are here divided. Later Manuscripts, the last to appear and the largest volume of ...”