“... will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to Andrew Bonar Law, another Scots-Canadian son of the manse with a New Brunswick background, who was a rising star in the Unionist (Conservative) Party. It was the beginning of a strange, enduring relationship: Bonar Law as Aitken’s political patron and ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”

“... setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. I think this is one of the places Thomas starts, with the intuition of, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘the latency of all in each’. The idea threatens a ...”

“... polite, then, for him to acknowledge as indispensable two particular books about Caravaggio (by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Peter Robb) from which he has drawn an enormous amount.Sudden Death is full of asides: ‘As I write, I don’t know what this book is about. It’s not exactly about a tennis match … Maybe it’s just a book about how to write this ...”

“... always been the reverse. For him, there is no time to linger: from the first thought to the first motion is a matter of seconds; the last aversion or appetite triggers the jump to the deed. And if along the way he speaks false words? Well, words are of limited consequence. What people want is a spectacle; they will attend to what you do, not what you say; and ...”

“... having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care about.’Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held ...”

“... least, the British Parliament. The historian Hugh Thomas had put forward to the House of Lords a motion asking the Cuban Government that Valladares be set free. This is the same Lord Thomas who in his history of Cuba wrote that the New York Times – specifically, an article written by the late Herbert Matthews in February 1957, after interviewing the Cuban ...”

“... Specifically, Bright asked him to testify in support of two claims which he was making in a motion for a new trial. Bright’s client is – the case is not yet resolved – Carzell Moore, a black man convicted, along with an accomplice, of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old white convenience store clerk. He is awaiting execution. Bright planned to ...”

“... and affiliation. Clients were united in pain, the grudge of benevolent imprisonment and diminished motion: they seethed, they drifted into reverie or chemically induced suspension of reality. ‘Hasidic Jews, mad old Cockneys,’ Will reported with relish. ‘A clinically obese man, a giant of flab, being fed by his mother.’ One by one, the members of the ...”

“... was so moved by the glorious sight, he cried.On the one hand, the prospect of Tolkien as a major motion-picture event suggests that the man and his oeuvre are about to be turned inside out. This most backward-looking and fustily word-bound of popular novels is about to become merely a marginal, rather literary-looking advert for a multimedia franchise a bit ...”

“... of the trilogy is thus a snapping of the links between the constituent elements that set it in motion. Capitalism no longer requires – this: or any? – bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is no longer committed to – this: or any? – liberalism. The demonstratives remain indeterminate, leaving the difference between the particular and the generic in ...”

“... powers. With these institutions in place, the second cycle of postwar Turkish politics was set in motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of successor formations, still commanded a comfortable majority of the country. By 1965, this was consolidated ...”

“... if its outcomes were already clearer. In practice the expansion of the EU to the East was set in motion in 1993, and completed – for the moment – only this year, with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria. At one level it is plain why it should be perhaps the principal source of satisfaction in today’s chorus of European self-congratulation. All nine ...”