“... seem so to today’s reader. At first, his faults are merely those of a puffed-up schoolboy prize-winner. The war, however, shows him in a steadily worse light. During his snatches of leave he torments both his fiancée and his mother by his aloofness: he browbeats shop assistants by flaunting his service at the Front: his emotional repertoire consists of ...”

“... Who was exploiting whom, and how, is a complicated business. Mrs Epstein was certainly not a clear winner. Epstein himself, buoyed up by his work, its demands and its rewards, seems to have had a fair share of the egotism which goes with a sense of one’s own genius. He also seems to have been right to assume that whatever problems following his daemon might ...”

“... on the set of To Have and Have Not. On and off-screen love, like Taylor and Burton’s, is a PR winner. The film is all the better when one knows that they actually lived somewhat happily ever after. It was both Bogie and Bacall’s biggest and best part. It had taken a while for Bogart to come to terms with acting on camera. He began his career in the ...”

“... supporting British liberty and strength. Now English people who notice it wonder what it was for. David Cameron says he will fight to prevent the break-up of Britain ‘with every single fibre’. But why? When Salmond rang him up after the election and read out a shopping list of demands, Cameron seems to have been oddly silent. Many London commentators made ...”

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

“... per cent. In England the Tory vote rose by 1.5 per cent and Labour’s by 3.5 per cent. The big winner in England in terms of vote share was Ukip, which won 14.1 per cent of the vote. Turnout across Britain was slightly higher than in 2010, which is largely explained by the higher turnout in Scotland, continuing the trend begun in the referendum. Turnout in ...”

“... that their strongest card at the upcoming general election was Churchill himself, ‘the war winner’; the Tory manifesto, entitled ‘Mr Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors’, didn’t even mention the word ‘Conservative’. This had worked in 1918, when a coalition led by David Lloyd ...”

“... the ‘ethical character’ of Gladstone’s personality, the sense that he was not just a vote-winner, that gave him his hold over the new breed of political professionals who were interested in nothing more than getting out the vote. His electoral success, particularly after the Midlothian Campaign of 1879-80, also exemplified another aspect of modern ...”

“... French presidential elections, which were nonetheless hailed as a triumph for the ‘centrist’ winner.The left, let’s be honest, has had a pretty bad century so far. This is partly a matter of electoral defeats, from the US to the UK to France, Germany, Italy, Brazil etc, but also a consequence of its failure to come up with a new ideological framework ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can ...”

“... that could happen he had to spend some time in Italy to fulfil the obligations placed upon him as winner of the Prix de Rome. Then came the letter from Mme Moke – Camille would after all be marrying M. Pleyel, a manufacturer of patent pianofortes and hence a bastion of economic and matrimonial desirability. Berlioz’s mind swarmed anew with thoughts of ...”

“... in the hope that they will defuse opposition to their schemes: it would be uncharitable to David Blunkett to suppose that he really was as naive as he pretended to be in pronouncing biometric ID foolproof. The more disturbing fact is that he could say it and expect to be believed. Given Kahneman’s title, one might expect a paean to deliberation, the ...”

“... own a wine bar. After reading the book and discussing his results with Ameisen, Jean Dausset, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Medicine, said: ‘Olivier Ameisen has discovered the treatment of addiction.’ There are now many small studies of baclofen and its effects on alcoholism underway, and one hopes that larger, government-sponsored studies will ...”

“... was anecdotal evidence of abuse of the present system by a handful of asylum-seekers; but, as David Heath MP pointed out, the normal way of dealing with abuse of a system is to put an end to the abuse, not the system. Only the year before, a high-speed process of statutory review by the High Court had been instituted. In the course of an unusually loud ...”

“... behind the scenes … he was the alpha dog.’ Nadal ‘hit every third ball into the corner for a winner, rather than back up the middle as usual practice etiquette demanded’. You would hope that their biographies would provide fuller portraits, but Clarey seems more concerned with maintaining his subjects’ aura than achieving intimacy. Nadal’s ...”