“... Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white jeans, made a fool of herself punting, had her heart broken by a dashing Pakistani, and experimented with alcohol, once and once only, in the lavatory of the Bodleian. But ‘by the popular morality of the time Suu was a pure Oriental ...”

“... the people. In his book, more a synthesis of published material than the product of new research, Michael Sheridan suggests that accounts of these years remain open to some doubt. The adolescent Xi is said to have spent his evenings reading Marx and making repeated attempts to join the party. Sheridan doesn’t see how The Communist Manifesto can have ...”

“... pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city ...”

“... with one leg pointing downwards to the sea and the other playfully curled beneath her in her white playsuit. Her arms behind her back were keeping her upright, exposing her breasts. Douglas Fairbanks was looking towards her appreciatively. The photo said no more than that a famous man looked at her, as if she were a mirror in which to check he still had ...”

“... Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is ...”

“... a favourite conceit of conservatives. Before he became attorney general in Bush’s second term, Michael Mukasey informed civil libertarians that they, and not those who illegally tortured prisoners of war, were going to have blood on their hands. The offence of the liberals, he claimed bizarrely in the Wall Street Journal, was to advocate judicial oversight ...”

“... the streets bustling with shops, cafés and restaurants. Leaveland is a country of the old, the white and the nostalgic, of ruined factories and boarded-up shops. Rushing along the network of high-speed rail corridors that enable Remainians to move from point to point around their country without touching Leaveland, a middle-aged Remainian writer confronts ...”

“... ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ Lincoln was a Republican, of course, but John Kerry’s journey has been a very modern one for a Democrat, a journey around every aspect of himself and every issue pressing in America, cutting and rounding and paring away as he ...”

“... the inner cage and the Professor could, by creeping a little nearer, have witnessed what no white man had ever seen: half-dance, half-drama, the first work of art created by a species less than man … He found he had, in unscientific compunction, averted his eyes.What happens after the heist is pure soap opera. Search parties trawl the zoo looking for ...”

“... A first attempt to create an NHS came in 1944, with the publication of a woolly and confusing White Paper. GPs, for example, were to be employed, probably on a salaried basis, by a Central Medical Board. The British Medical Association concluded that this was ‘the thin end of the wedge of a form of service to which it is overwhelmingly opposed – a ...”

“... of moral disarray and social disaggregation at home. Nor were such warning signs confined to the White House. Persisting black-white antagonisms were aggravated by Hispanic and other immigrations, and by gnawing disquiet about elites, privatisation, and the loss of class and other communities. The weird non-election of ...”

“... the Vatican; b) 300 litres at a discount of 15 per cent on presentation of Cardinal Vouchers (the white ones), to be used inside the Holy See … While I remain at your service for every eventual elucidation, I am pleased to take this opportunity to assure you, in line with my most devoted respect for Your Most Reverend Eminence, that I remain your most ...”

“... sure.15 January. Alan Rickman dies. In the first week of The Habit of Art at the National in 2009 Michael Gambon, playing Auden, was taken ill and rushed to St Thomas’s. He recovered quite quickly, and indeed got out of the ambulance saying: ‘I know what they’re all doing now – sitting up in the canteen recasting.’ Which indeed we were, with my ...”

“... Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring from the back of the building. When she told her aunt she was reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building ...”

“... issue of the Harvard Law Review featured a remarkable example of cynical realism, written by Michael Klarman, another leading analyst of constitutional law. His article, ‘The Degradation of American Democracy – and the Court’, appeared as the foreword to the annual issue of the Review devoted to the previous year’s Supreme Court term. In what is ...”