“... of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a warrant, communications to and from the United States (an action forbidden under federal law ...”

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the ...”

“... activists among the thousands of Luo who would travel to the city for the funeral. The Government took no chances. Mortuary and forensic formalities were hastily completed and the funeral service scheduled for the Tuesday, barely 72 hours after the murder, which didn’t allow much time for the long journeys that many would have to make from the Luo homelands ...”

“... civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books about the horrors of Marxism’. ‘At the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter ...”

“... you feel, so that Kiberd could play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and ...”

“... traces changes in what people chose or were able to record. From the very beginning, photographers took over the mundane job of representation in portraiture and topography. But they also wanted – or were asked – to capture on film things that were fleeting, strange or dangerous. Animals in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught ...”

“... a flurry of telephone calls and consultations with fellow travellers who had similar plans, we took a taxi and went by the recently hit but shortest route via Zahle and Tarshish. Along the way, we passed a convoy of ambulances. When we arrived home two and a half hours later, my parents greeted us with tears in their eyes. The road we had been on was hit ...”

“... C’mon – you’re joking, right?’ ‘No. Really. Look at this thing,’ I said. Michael took in the ancient interior and medieval seatbelts. ‘Can you call and tell him we’ll get there around noon?’ ‘I only have his email. I just told him we’d be there.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ll keep driving.’ We were, I later discovered, driving ...”

“... the point where the river was navigable, a journey that lasted between three weeks and a month. It took three years to build the first 14 miles of railway, and the line didn’t open until 1898. Just as the carrying of goods had been done by forced labour, some of the workers who built the railway line were also, in effect, slaves. ‘The ...”

“... It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants ...”

“... name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables – John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn’t prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we’re talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don’t think so. Bond. It’s in the name. More than ...”

“... and defended in the plainest prose. Lest that give the impression that Jerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer see themselves as Marxists first and philosophers second, it must at once be said that their work is remarkable for the unflinching way in which they throw out whatever won’t pass a dispassionate scrutiny. Elster’s Making sense of Marx has been ...”

“... of the 1970s – Ghost Rider, Luke Cage, Warlock, Iron Fist. His favourite comic-book artist was John Byrne.Karl got in trouble a lot. Luke didn’t.Though all three of us lived in rough parts of Brooklyn, Karl and I went to a terrifying public school in an impoverished neighbourhood, while Luke went to St Ann’s School, safe in moneyed Brooklyn ...”

“... that he himself, during his short stay, dropped his customary ‘Curzon-like aloofness’ and took on what he called ‘a mask of playful blarney’, which must have been appreciated.He did not think much of the Irish. ‘Apart from the fact,’ he wrote to his friend John Hayward, ‘that the Irish have a certain ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”