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“... into the ballroom are paying only partial attention to the presentation by the Enron Corporation. On the New York Stock Exchange, Enron’s shares have been rising all day, by as much as $2 an hour. It is now mid-afternoon, New York is about to close, and the members of the audience know that the moment to profit will have ...”

“... This​ was a 42-year marriage of convenience between forgiving but frequently exasperated business partners and poetry rivals. It was launched with a seize-the-day telegram, after a one-night, earth-shuddering, world-tilting performance in a jazzed-up garage. Before moving on to occasional meetings and decades of dutiful, near conjugal correspondence from all parts of the globe ...”

“... Aidan Carl Mathews’s ‘Severances’, and John Levett’s ‘The Photographs of Paris’. The first two are longish, the others shorter. The only one that won a prize – and that the smallest, £100 – is ‘Corolla’, a sequence of nine exactly rhymed and metred sonnets, culminating in a stunning ...”

“... and mysterious presence, a man around whom other characters weave tall tales. Towards the end of the novel, in a sly nod to a constant on conspiracy websites, one of them wonders whether Tesla was behind the Tunguska Event, a ten-megaton blast that destroyed 830 square miles ...”

“... When William Laughton Lorimer, formerly Professor of Greek at St Andrews, died in 1967, he left behind him the manuscript of a translation of the New Testament into Scots, on which he had been working for the past ten years ...”

“... Kathleen Tynan says that she wavered for some time between writing a personal memoir of her 16 years with her husband Kenneth and embarking on a full-dress biography, embracing the 36 before they met. As she foresaw, making the second choice has produced an odd, hybrid book, not quite one thing nor the other ...”

“... a domed stained-glass ceiling and a ‘slightly Turkish quality’, there would be ‘a big buffet on the side with the most marvellous things – I mean the most delicious kinds of strawberry and raspberry tarts in the dead of winter; and always champagne’. (He didn’t mention the ...”

“... another one, not yet focused but beginning to loom pretty large. Something was taking the place of history, some hefty compound of nostalgia, propaganda, heritage, sheer imagination, which made it look as if we had always been, until recently, just what we wished we had been – or what ...”

“... children: Susanna in 1583 and twins, Judith and Hamnet, two years later. The few surviving scraps of evidence raise as many questions as they answer, especially the will in which Shakespeare bequeathed Ann their ‘second best bed’. No record of Ann Hathaway’s baptism has been found. The only reason to believe that she ...”

“... In his 1987 autobiography, Arthur Miller tells of a conversation with a Kentucky farmer about the Holy Ghost. Pressed to give a definition of the most mysterious element in the Trinity, the farmer replied: ‘I figure it’s sort of an oblong blur ...”

“... splendour, looking like some pixillated Nestor, venerated from far and near as the oracular source of wisdom on Italian art, ‘II Bibi’ took on an iconic quality. In the public mind, he became the incarnation of Renaissance man, sustaining an ...”

“... some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication ...”

“... At 8 o’clock on the night of 30 October 1938, listeners to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air might have noticed a short announcement: the show that evening was going to be an adaptation of H ...”