“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both homicidal and suicidal’. He means it, too. All this makes his Diaries a strange read, because they are interesting, indeed fascinating, in many of their details, yet draining and demoralising in their cumulative effect. Reading this book is like standing listening to someone ranting and ...”

“... of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes. His most famous creation was the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking (on account of his leggings), Hawk-eye (on account of his astonishingly good eyesight), La Longue Carabine (on account of his ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... first-class people to semi-starvation.’ He had in mind the treatment of people like his father, David, who, as Bevan put it, was ‘choked to death’ by pneumoconiosis (a lung condition caused by long-term inhalation of coal dust) but received no compensation since the condition wasn’t classified as an industrial disease under the Workmen’s ...”

“... that’s been nearly universally praised. Before it was even published, the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, called it ‘extraordinary’; the New York Times critic A.O. Scott said it was ‘essential, like water or air’; in a widely circulated blurb, Toni Morrison likened Coates to Baldwin and declared the book ‘required reading’; even Jay-Z ...”

“... Johns continued with Hopps, ‘and how to add space and still keep it an object painting.’ His means were sometimes simple (a tin cup or an old ruler attached to a canvas), and sometimes complicated: spatial bursts of bright colours stencilled with the names of those colours but in ways that rarely match up. Such developments close out the first decade of ...”

“... another programmer prompted me to look into ‘fingerprinting’. Fingerprinting a phone or laptop means scanning it for characteristics that will help to identify it at a later point or in a different context. What model do you have? Which language setting are you using? Which browser, and which version of it? How does your browser render fonts on your ...”

“... occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its psychological determinism has undermined their dignity. To ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... not to LSD, but to politics. All that is now less relevant. Thirty-four years of Left Front rule means that the coalition must take responsibility for various transgressions. Among them are the politicisation of institutions, their alleged infiltration by party members or sympathisers; a recalcitrant work ethic, encouraged by militant trade unions; the awful ...”

“... that ‘the secret’ to Carlsen’s greatness is that ‘it remains a secret,’ whatever that means. During​ the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time watching Carlsen play blitz (five-minute) and bullet (one-minute) chess online. He says he does this to relax and to rejuvenate his ego by thrashing wired bunglers after he’s lost a serious ...”

“... should be ‘exaltation’, although it is hard to be sure. Referring to ‘the historian David Irving’ is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller. There were, I think, few ballpoint pens in 1940. On page 160 the idea that the USA passed straight from barbarism to decadence is praised as if it had been conceived by Muggeridge, instead of Oscar ...”

“... Nothing is more striking than the ‘immense, unstoppable relish’ with which Picasso puts ‘the means of illusionism through their paces’ for one last time in the paintings from Céret and Sorgues. Why did he do so? In part, he was reacting to the ‘nerveless academicism’ of his own work at Cadaqués. More important, he was testing the ways in which ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”