“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...”

“... cushions featuring doggy pin-ups, pert chows and shivering, ratty, handbag things floating above black modernist thrones. Lucky babes in an unlucky world. Red and white ribbons giftwrapped the latest auto-shunt. This is a two-car town, congestion addressed by the never successful gimmick of particular numberplates allowed on particular days. Even the ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... monkeys on the ends of chains. Small pale-skinned children stared at us as we approached, their black hair long at the back and cut straight in the fringe – the characteristic Penan mullet. On each of the platforms an entire extended family cooked, ate and slept. A week ago, there had been nothing here, and in a few weeks’ time the Penan would have ...”

“... Thames had long been used as a common dump for human and animal excrement. In 1855, the chemist Michael Faraday was horrified by the river’s appearance and stink: ‘The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’; ‘The smell was very bad’; ‘The feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.’ The coincidence ...”

“... to help with its construction. The day I went to see her, Sister Josepha was wearing sandals and a black wimple, and her eyes smiled through gold-rimmed spectacles. Behind her stood a large print of the Virgin and Child. ‘There was an awakening with Anthony,’ she said. ‘He developed into a bit of a monkey and people wanted to be with him. It was just too ...”

“... Shortly after the arrest Peterson asked Ingram if he’d ever been involved in any kind of black magic. Ingram admitted that he used to look at his horoscope in the paper, but didn’t seem to understand what Peterson was driving at. One of the police officers explained what Peterson meant: ‘The Satan cult kind of thing.’ The Ingrams belonged to a ...”

“... stressed, was modified to mortuary standards. We bundled up his clothes and shoes in a couple of black binliners and took them to the charity shop. I imagined, in those mystifying days after his death, while he was still lying in the refrigerated garage and normal time had been put on ice, that we would sort through his stuff, but this never happened.I do ...”

“... against dirty’) in canary-yellow pullovers. Thoroughbred anti-capitalists dressed head to toe in black are a small, dissident presence, their gas masks and open umbrellas a nod to protesters in Hong Kong. They sing facetious limericks, mocking environmentalists for their failure to identify capitalism as the real enemy. XR Belgium arrives with a raucous ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... underwent further, critical changes in the 1980s, with the rise of small export firms and a black economy – the ‘second Italian miracle’, as it was hopefully referred to at the time – the party was unprepared again, and this time the blow to its standing as the political representative of the collective labourer proved fatal. Twenty years ...”

“... especially in America, where Israeli propaganda seems to lead a life of its own. Whereas, in 1975, Michael Adams and Christopher Mayhew were able to write about a coherent but unstated policy of unofficial British press censorship, according to which unpleasant truths about Zionism were systematically suppressed, the situation is not nearly as obvious so far ...”

“... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...”

“... criticised: ‘You are here to study pandas, not golden monkeys’ – or Takin bulls, or Asiatic black bears, or rock squirrels, or to note minor ecological occurrences within the habitat of the panda, all of which he could not help doing. The Chinese also objected to foreigners collecting specimens (scientific imperialism), and Schaller became convinced ...”