“... the Loch Ness monster being found are a bizarrely low 500 to 1. (Another 5000 to 1 bet offered by William Hill is that Barack Obama will play cricket for England. I’d advise against that punt.) Nonetheless, 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime ...”

“... Giandomenico Majone (Italy), theorist of regulation; the jurists Dieter Grimm (Germany) and Thomas Horsley (Britain); the sociologists Claus Offe and Wolfgang Streeck (Germany); the political scientists Christopher Bickerton (Britain), Morten Rasmussen (Denmark) and Antoine Vauchez (France); the historians Kiran Klaus Patel (Germany) and Vera Fritz ...”

“... determination. It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household. Jorge Luis ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... 8205 1) The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World’s Greatest Challenge by Kirstin Dow and Thomas Downing (Earthscan, 112 pp., £12.99, October 2006, 978 1 84407 376 9) Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy by William Sweet (Columbia, 256 pp., £17.95, April 2006, 978 ...”

“... looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have used the 1832 miniature by William Thomson of a 22-year-old Gaskell, or perhaps Richmond’s 1851 drawing (there isn’t as much difference between them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took ...”

“... social history, whose work has focused on poverty, emigration and women’s history; and William Duncan, an expert in family law at Trinity College Dublin and one of the authors of The Hague Children’s Conventions – were tasked with reporting on the way the homes were managed, ‘entrance and exit pathways’ for women and children, mortality ...”

“... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...”

“... to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your ...”

“... had been improved, the threshing machine had been invented, and crop rotation had taken hold. William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides – originally a column that appeared in the Political Register between 1822 and 1826 – captured the movements which created the basis of the farming world we know. Cobbett rode out on horseback to look at farms to the south ...”

“... We are a long way from the days when European and American expats – Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Joe Orton and others – enjoyed the sexual courtesy of Moroccan lovers while the colonial regime and its successors turned a blind eye.Crucially, in Morocco – though not in Western Sahara – the regime has moved on from its traditional ...”

“... that way. After all, Larkin the librarian –No, I don’t think one can.Or Eliot the publisher. William Shakespeare engaged very successfully with the workaday world.Of course.As for your ‘Lives of the Poets’, which you’ve just finished, can you tell me which of the poets are in it?Well, they’re pretty much the ones you’d expect. They are all dead ...”

“... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...”