“... in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up the old (thirtysomething) troupers’ blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life ...”

“... DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... for three years as an infantry officer in France. In 1975 he was moved to write to the historian Michael Howard by exasperation with Paul Fussell’s newly published The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell, an American critic and veteran of World War Two, suggested that what had happened to those who fought in France was so uniquely dreadful that it defied ...”

“... advocate of realism, Dr FitzGerald, is a statesman who, in the Fine Gael mould effectively cast by Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, seems to share British attitudes to the politics of the possible. His views on the future of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the ...”

“... funeral procession to Brookwood Crematorium required three special trains and was attended by many young men who were to be heard much of in the next century, notably Gandhi and Lloyd George. Lord Queensberry was also present, to bear witness to his loathing of ‘Christian tomfoolery’. So was Walter Sickert, who painted the enormous portrait of Bradlaugh ...”

“... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...”

“... families with investments, while at the same time inflating housing costs to levels that most young people struggle with.The book shows that many of the families which maintain their status in the wealth elite over decades can rely not just on one generation of financial support but on two. Rich grandparents are as useful as rich parents. This is hardly ...”

“... the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st century.‘How to Write about Africa’ set the tone for a weary scepticism about the way non-Africans behave or speak when they arrive on the continent. For the British-Nigerian essayist Dipo ...”

“... who supported him; to help find peace in the country which is the Jewish national home; to the young who need the chance he had to make for himself; and to promoting for others the education which he never had.’ The rival biographers do not see the Liechtenstein connection in the same rosy light. Tom Bower, observing that the Principality is the ideal ...”

“... have recently encouraged some considerable biographical studies. Among these are three books by Michael Reynolds on aspects of Hemingway’s life and reading, and the comprehensive Hemingway (1985) by the indefatigable English biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Reynolds and Meyers stepped outside the ring where the mythographers and debunkers had slugged it ...”

“... him seem excessively extravagant in future’, inclined to ‘revel in the delights of life as a young rake or “Lebebaby”, to use a term popular in the Vienna of the 1920s. He was introduced to Vienna’s night life by his uncle Rudolf.’ Armand is regularly described as ‘workshy’ in Lützeler’s book. He went to Greece in 1934 as representative of ...”

“... had bowed to the inevitable, had settled for Hungarian neutrality and had gone for good. A young woman, a teacher, was sure that the revolution would change her life: ‘We’ll be able to read Western books and newspapers; we’ll even be able to travel.’ At our next stop, Magyaróvár, the people were still in shock. They took us to a park ...”

“... to place it in the National Gallery. In the following year he consoled himself with Piero’s St Michael, which entered the Gallery after his death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly ...”

“... Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years ...”