“... you don’t install mirrored wardrobes.’ Later on there’s a two-page spread of the young actor James Franco’s lips. That’s Gentleman’s Quarterly for you: a magazine for men who want to have what women have – clean nails, hairless chests, fresh armpits and moist lips. A magazine for men clever enough to want to look like the kind of person they’re ...”

“... for the next twenty years and do all the things he would do. It’s not like Tiger Woods or LeBron James, where since they were twelve you knew they were going to be superstars … It’s not so clear-cut in tennis. It takes time to evolve.’ Federer lost his next match to Tim Henman.‘Every successful player compromises their entire childhood to make ...”

“... after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about National Socialism.’ Wodehouse revised by James Lees-Milne. Fear of the mob; order and chaos. As with the world so with fiction: elephantine narratives, multiple versions running away from each other, stories begetting stories. How to keep it under control? ‘I’m talking about, I don’t know, about ...”

“... cutting when the yellow flag iris comes into flower because by then the oils in the bog will have risen, but not everyone waits that long. It might mean cutting too late, and then the peats won’t dry. If they’re not ready by July, they’re not worth the effort – damp peat is no use to anyone who wants to stay warm. You can also cut too early: a hard ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”

“... in the past twenty years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the pure sea air it measures has risen 10 per cent, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The figure is reliable; there is no percentage in faking the weather. As far as any humans can be, the IPCC’s scientists are as impartial as the air we breathe. Atmospheric co2 is, beyond any ...”

“... In a 1968 cable, the US ambassador to Congo, Robert McBride, wrote that Mobutu ‘has apparently risen in soufflé-like grandiloquence’. He continued to rise, thanks to his Western allies, who appreciated his hostility to national liberation movements in Africa. The pillars of his regime were the security services and the parti unique, the Mouvement ...”

“... COP to write something for my paper, I told them, which that morning had published two pieces (by James Butler and Adam Tooze) about Andreas Malm, the Swedish climate theorist and author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Malm says it’s time, I said, for climate campaigners to move on from XR-type theatrics to disciplined sabotage of fossil-fuel ...”

“... died on a cross (thanks to the Jews, they said); here, too, he had been laid in a tomb and had risen again from the dead. So Christians turned from the Temple ruins on the east side of the city to the west, where these events had happened. Even if a historian exercises professional scepticism, the odds are that their identification of the site was ...”

“... workers heading for the goldfields (it was futile: four years later the Chinese population had risen to nearly forty thousand). British Columbia passed a Chinese Regulation Act in 1884, directed against imported labour. In South Africa, a Colonial Patriotic Union was formed in Natal in 1896 to resist further ‘Asiatic’ (meaning Indian) immigration; the ...”

“... American soldiers from foreign conflicts, troop numbers have barely fallen overall and have risen in the Persian Gulf. The administration has been presented as ‘isolationist’ yet has agreed bilateral trade deals around the world and strengthened ties with Japan, Israel and Saudi Arabia – three traditional partners – while undertaking major war ...”

“... in January 1951, it reappeared on the Home Service. Plomley restrung his hammock, his fee having risen to 22 guineas per episode. This was when guests began to be offered a choice of book and luxury to take to their desert island along with the records, plus Shakespeare and the Bible; the first luxury, chosen by the actress Sally Ann Howes, was ...”

“... Party Conference, Ernest Bevin came raging up to those, including Ian Mikardo and oddly enough James Callaghan, who had called for public ownership to be in the Manifesto and yelled: ‘Congratulations! You have just lost us the election.’) Harold Wilson actually beat the Tories four times at the polls, which on the consensus calculus makes him the most ...”

“... to succeed in the small and still male-dominated enclave of SF, the talented woman who writes as James Tiptree Jr was obliged to keep her femininity a close secret.) In the 20th century, genre, or ‘category’, fiction has often enforced pseudonymy for the commercial reason that the author’s name must chime harmoniously with the product. Thus, in the ...”

“... contemptuously’ across the Pont Marie. Frock coat, tall hat, ‘gone-bad, luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a ...”