“... 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we ...”

“... them as being ‘dressed as for yachting’ (their summer uniform consisted of stripy blazers, white trousers and matching tasselled blue shoes).Having to deal with such people can’t have done much to alter the brothers’ sense of being at odds with a hidebound establishment. That feeling became even more ingrained after they bought Brecqhou, one of the ...”

“... Clinton to do it.’ Marinkovic removed his dark blue peaked hat, ran his fingers over his cropped white hair and then replaced the hat, making the final adjustments with unreasonable care. He proffered one of his appalling cigarettes. His wife had more to say about this national curse. She was fond of Scripture and had discovered in the Bible what she took to ...”

“... Melville created an austere, sombre aesthetic: even his colour films appear to be in black and white. His protagonists, whether resistants, gangsters or priests, are solitary ‘men without women’, in the words of Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as his assistant in the early 1960s. Driven by duty, they move inexorably towards their fate, which is often ...”

“... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested ...”

“... in a rally at Wembley Arena. They got their way: the plans were shelved by Clarke’s successor, Michael Howard, in order to ‘avoid all-out war with the police’.After Labour came to power in 1997, the Blair government offered the police a new settlement. Funding increased by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and there were a range of new powers such as ...”

“... to tallest, shivering with cold or terror or both. One is old, with a bare head and a full white beard, looking in this light like a peasant from an Ilya Repin painting. The others are barely out of their teens, with pinched faces and hunched shoulders, their thin green beanies pulled down over their ears. They mutter an appeal – presumably forced ...”

“... regulation, still attached to Birmingham and Cambridge Universities. Gently sunburned, with white hair and beard, he’s almost seventy; he has a Puckish energy, an enthusiasm more postgraduate than professorial, and a way of punctuating his conversation with a falsetto giggle. He once said that instead of RIP, the inscription on his gravestone should ...”

“... Amis was trying to get beyond it as long ago as 1980, when he wrote (reviewing Joan Didion’s The White Album for this paper) that Yeats’s ‘“The Second Coming” was written half a century ago. The centre hasn’t been holding for some time now; actually the centre was never holding, and never will hold.’ It’s the specific image of the pregnant ...”

“... sprawl scattered like so much confetti over the gnarly green terrain. In the distance, the tall white cluster of buildings that formed downtown Los Angeles poked through a corona of smog. Coming into view below was my destination: the 480-acre subdivision established in 1887 and named ‘Hollywood’ by a real estate speculator’s wife because, she ...”

“... and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the farce we are watching now. The battle of Brexit came about not because of any serious demand for national change but for the reasons that the Wars of the Roses came about: a power vendetta within a tiny group of privileged ...”

“... there was a way of sending yourself into a trance. You had to imagine yourself entering a warm white fog. He tried this out, and the images came to him. ‘I would’ve removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown ... I would’ve told her to be quiet and uh, not say anything to anybody and threatened to her ... to say that I would kill her if she ...”

“... the public eye, although she saw the necessity of it.’ The two women went to the same school, St Michael’s Grammar, and they knew each other’s families from way back. Lurgan is the sort of place where everyone can seem to know everyone else. Dara finished a PhD in politics a few years ago at Queen’s University in Belfast – on community groups – and ...”

“... all Labour here”’). He came third in the first round of voting among Labour MPs, behind Michael Foot and Callaghan, and promptly withdrew. He then withdrew from domestic politics more comprehensively by becoming president of the European Commission, spending four years in Brussels with limited power and abundant perks. Jenkins raised the profile of ...”

“... obvious solution to a Zen koan. Bang! I recall Jack Nicholson’s cameo in Easy Rider. The manic white-gleam orthodontics at the campfire, before the redneck attack that will kill him. He mouths Terry Southern’s dialogue against a racket of cicadas and lone dogs. ‘You ever talk to bullfrogs in the middle of the night?’ That Cheshire Cat grin in the ...”