“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like this,’ the arresting officer said. It was less than three weeks after 9/11. He was told by another officer that he would probably be detained until at least after his flight had left.‘At this point,’ Ali writes in You Can’t Please All, his second volume of memoirs, ‘my patience ...”

“... uploaded Bradley Manning’s leaked data to a place where its subjects could read it, which is said to have played a role in the Arab Spring too. But the old, irreplaceable dance of democracy, which those digital media helped make happen, still took place between bodies in public. Indeed, the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come ...”

“... Holroyd has a lot of interesting things to say. Lee had a miraculous voice-training method and is said, though not very credibly, to have been one of the models for Du Maurier’s Svengali. He was a bit shady, a bit of a rogue – a type Shaw habitually fell for and habitually treated with great generosity. In conscious or unconscious emulation he liked to ...”

“... The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) … ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?’ Millions​ of people then and ever since have shared the bafflement and anguish of Prince Lichnowsky and have asked the same questions ...”

“... confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an … (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of ...”

“... of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when they report I was a coal lobbyist.’)*It is revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara desert to keep out refugees.*Testifying ...”

“... the family next to us. ‘C’est le maréchal, il est mort, là-bas,’ the man of the family said, pointing to the horizon. Philippe Pétain died at 9.22 a.m. on 23 July 1951. He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for ...”

“... However peculiar we may find this remark, the method would certainly be justified if it indeed said anything very new or interesting about the novels or the novelist. But it doesn’t, and at first it isn’t easy to see what it provides instead, especially since it avoids gossip, or claims to. What then does it offer? The answer is that it offers lots of ...”

“... and detail. It is without any doubt a central historical document of the period it covers. That said, the apparently exhaustive accounts of issues and events are often crucially distorted by omissions and silences. Her rendition of the Westland affair makes almost no mention of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter and the bogus ‘inquiry’ into ...”

“... mathematics, starved himself to death, believing his doctors were poisoning him. Dirac, who said, ‘I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all,’ but correctly predicted the existence of anti-matter, was famous ...”

“... recited in British and American universities about what these three philosophers wanted, what they said, and where they went wrong. For the book offers an Anglo-Saxon audience features not previously found within a single volume. It is an insider’s book, in the sense that the young Habermas cut his philosophical teeth on Heidegger – just as the young ...”

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ‘we’ cannot live without the ...”

“... to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the other. This exchange, according to Mitchell, was ‘not unkind’; the women were amused because ‘they knew how unreliable a club could be.’ Adulterous affairs were commonplace well into the middle age of Sayre’s parents’ generation and ‘were ...”

“... River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the ...”