“... the buildings looking out onto the boardwalk and the ocean. I went to see him there. The building may once have been prestigious but now Volodya’s apartment was at the end of a long, black, mouldy corridor smelling of stewed cabbage. His walls were yellow with cigarette smoke, the main room empty apart from a huge plasma TV. He lives alone. A wardrobe ran ...”

“... to measure – and that’s a practical matter – but measures are not merely more or less, they may be just or unjust. There is no way to disentangle their instrumental and moral aspects. Standards were norms, just as the Roman norma was a tool for obtaining right angles, the usage later extending to standards of right moral action. God traditionally kept ...”

“... conviction), was fit to manage his relations with the press. The appointment of Coulson, made in May 2007 on the recommendation of the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, soon proved its political worth. News International’s tabloids switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives; and senior Conservatives and Scotland Yard officials managed to ...”

“... it to her classmates herself. Encouraged by her mother, who changed her own middle name from May to Marguerite because it was ‘more sophisticated’, Angela Yvonne Davis was fluent enough at 17 to try it out in the real world: she and her sister went to a shoe shop in Birmingham, Alabama and pretended they were French. The clerks were having trouble ...”

“... To add to the comfort, the enemy has an endless capacity to blunder, and while the heroes may be unconventional – Macintyre loves all that – they are also cunning and brave and generally impervious, like comic-book characters. He delights in the codenames devised by Robertson: a fat agent is called ‘Balloon’; a womaniser with a fondness for ...”

“... is multiple choice.’ ‘Now he supports the minimum wage. If we give him two more weeks he may even vote for me.’ Michelle Obama is currently the most popular political figure in America, with an approval rating of 66 per cent. Her politics consist of showing obese children how to exercise, coming to the aid of veterans’ families, and loving her ...”

“... must be friends with spiders and snakes, and a whole lot of other nonsensical stuff which we may as well concede is funny in its way and funny to a point. But it is no longer Huckleberry Finn; it is no longer an unflinching tale of the cruelty and wrong of human bondage. ‘In the whole reach of English literature,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote in ...”

“... indulges is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.’ He distinguishes firmly between Eden as a dream of the past and the New Jerusalem as a project for the future. In Eden, he says, ‘it is absolutely required that one be happy and likeable,’ whereas in New Jerusalem ...”

“... On 19 May 1836, less than a month after the Texan Republic won independence from Mexico in the Battle of San Jacinto, a large group of Indians rode up to the gate of Parker’s Fort, near present-day Mexia, east of Waco. The Parker clan had travelled from Illinois to the extremities of the Texas frontier three years earlier, with 30 oxcarts of belongings and a religious zeal that was anything but missionary ...”

“... thing to do – Judeo/Christian principles – You are not a murderer – Sanctity of life – He may listen to reason – Post-traumatic stress – Won’t be able to live with yourself – Murder is wrong! Under the heading ‘Kill Him’ there is only one entry: – He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go. It isn’t immediately obvious that ...”

“... required obedience and conformity in public, putting in an appearance with office colleagues on May Day for the parade or avoiding critical remarks about the Soviet Union in the bus queue. But once home, your private life – boring, alcoholic, even bourgeois – was your own affair. To call such regimes totalitarian seems far-fetched; their degree of ...”

“... this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English department, replied: The information you suggest suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in. A few words about my schooling, for ...”

“... narrative to the capture of a single moment, and from a verbal to a visual medium. For Miller this may appear to be an ‘effacement of the problem of language’, because ‘the implication is that the language of realism is a literal, non-figurative language functioning like a photograph or like a scientific drawing. It goes by way of a one-to-one ...”

“... that detained children are physically abused in these prisons. A boy who steals a pomegranate may steal another one and end up next to a kid who knows the quick way to another world. One boy, Beltoon, came from the province of Paktia. The families in his village competed over whose sons would be sent to the madrassah. ‘You do not love your son, you do ...”

“... Of​ the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs. He gave his crippled legs nicknames: ‘Josephine’ was the obliging left one; the right, ‘Geraldine’, ‘a hellion, a bitch a psychopath’, was amputated mid-thigh in 1958 ...”