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“... outlets announced that Joe Biden had won the electoral college, clips of ‘Everybody Rejoice (A Brand New Day)’ from The Wiz (1978), an all-Black version of The Wizard of Oz, appeared everywhere online. While the director (Sidney Lumet) and screenwriter (Joel Schumacher) were both white, the music was mostly written by the Black lyricist and composer ...”

“... currency for every Eurozone country,’ the French economist Michel Aglietta and his co-author, Thomas Brand, write in Un New Deal pour l’Europe. ‘It binds them to rigidly fixed exchange rates, regardless of their underlying economic realities, and strips them of monetary autonomy.’ For Aglietta, a currency is essentially a social ...”

“... to ‘integrity’. It just so happens that he has in mind the difficulty of ‘maintaining brand integrity’, and the so-called ‘disasters’ are ‘international marketing blunders’. Any suspicions that this might be devaluing the word ‘disaster’ are confirmed when you read the first such story in the opening chapter. An English airline ...”

“... Times obituary of his own, his walk-on part in HKH’s send-off his only claim to that particular brand of immortality. The German Government paid him £300,000 for his pains, of which, HKH’s elegist recounts with some glee, ‘all but the first £29,000 was in forged sterling notes’ – so he didn’t even get his 30 pieces of silver. He was never ...”

“... put on lavish display so advertisers can decide where to bestow their munificence. And of the 38 brand-new programmes on the six major channels, none is a ‘reality’ show. This doesn’t mean, however, that the slough of degeneracy has at last been traversed and civilisation is advancing to the sunlit uplands; nor indeed that, waist-high in ...”

“... The story of the Lithuanian captain of a Soviet submarine defecting to the West, taking his brand-new ship with him, was first published by the Naval Institute Press – ‘the semi-official mouthpiece’, in Clancy’s words, ‘of the US Navy’. Nobody, least of all Clancy, at the time an insurance broker with an enthusiasm for naval ...”

“... is a ‘management-engineering company’, and shouldn’t be confused with Immac, which is a brand line of depilatory treatments. The 43-year-old WHSmith Literary Award, forced to compete in an ever-expanding marketplace and unable to lay claim to any absolute superlatives – it’s merely ‘one of the oldest and most prestigious’ – was this year ...”

“... wants it or they’ll die. In order to accommodate this novel notion of deluxe, Dana Thomas, in her startling and richly informative book, draws a line between luxury and ‘the luxury industry’: The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact. It has become ...”

“... wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers. Gottfried Benn called him ‘one of my gods’; Lion Feuchtwanger ...”

“... this West Coast gravy train are, predictably, those consummate exterior decorators Frank Gehry and Thomas Heatherwick. They are unlikely to cede control to the rodents inhabiting their bespoke boxes which plainly derive from the biospheres and domes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Those are among the more feasible, more tested, hence more repeatable forms of that ...”

“... with strong smells tended to breed acceptance or even dependence. The Elizabethan entomologist Thomas Muffet (now remembered only for his daughter’s encounter with a spider) told the story of a man who used to clean privies entering an apothecary’s shop in Antwerp. He smelled the spices and promptly fainted. Fortunately, a bystander rushed ...”

“... completely. As well he might. Bombastic English has been vigorously deplored since the time of Sir Thomas More, and it would be difficult to demonstrate that there was relatively more (or less) of it around today. Bad spelling is certainly no measure. As a popular touchstone of literacy standards, it has a scarcely longer history than compulsory education. But ...”

“... a desire to distance himself from the theatre. He called the first two texts he wrote in Rome – Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867) – dramatic poems because he wanted to be free of the practical requirements of stage business. Their imaginative power exceeded that of anything he had written before. Brand tackled a serious ...”

“... The novel becomes a farrago of information. In choosing to write about the American Civil War Thomas Keneally ran several additional risks. The potential subject-matter is dauntingly multifarious. How could so vast a tragedy be focused and individualised? It was a war that fairly compels the commentator to take sides. Can the novelist do so without ...”

“... was given to me by a student translating Euripides on a mid-term exam. Those were the days.Once Thomas Hardy was strolling on the heath with a telescope and he put the telescope to his eye. He saw a man in white on the gallows at Dorchester and at that moment the man dropped down and the town clock struck eight. ‘Faintly.’ A faint note from the town ...”