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“... doubts about the German national character, which became the subject of a notorious seminar she held at Chequers with a group of historians to discuss what German reunification might mean for the rest of Europe. A note of the occasion made by Powell, which was subsequently leaked, listed some of the attributes that were considered: ‘Their insensitivity to ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... undressed and hung his clothes askew on the silent butler. When he took off his underpants, he held them in his hands a moment, expecting his wife to look towards him naked. She didn’t. About to throw his underpants on the floor, where his socks were, he noted, on the inside of the crotch, a yellow stain. He thought: Oh, Christ. He reached down for his ...”

“... facts presented in his account, and in those of pioneering media critics such as Liz Curtis and David Miller, suggest that a more critical verdict would not be out of place.* The early years of broadcasting in Northern Ireland had been safe and somnolent, as Savage describes. After BBC Northern Ireland was established between the wars, its directors quickly ...”

“... a left-wing victory was necessary for Spain’s democratic health. But now the Socialists have held too much power for too long. The PSOE has become too much part of the state, its members are in too many public positions, its control of many things – most glaringly of television – is too strong and too obvious. Spain has become too felipista just as ...”

“... was a reasonable adjective to use. ‘Organic democracy’ was of course a nonsense: it was held to stem from ‘natural organisms’ (the family, the municipality and the syndicate) rather than from unnatural, inorganic things like political parties. In any case, organic or otherwise, the regime was never a democracy. Franco’s ostentatious ...”

“... with the robust octogenarian, or nonagenarian, who attributes his longevity to a course of living held up as an example to all. Early rising, daily walks, simple diet, abstention from alcohol and tobacco, and a list of virtues are paraded for our inspiration, however contradictory and inconsistent they may be.’ His life, he was well aware, was likely to be ...”

“... and the threat of violence, by the total uncertainty and instability of day to day life. ‘People held their lives to be of no value,’ one Chinese writer said. ‘They knew none of the joys of being alive.’ As Parker points out, rates of suicide, abortion, infanticide and abandonment soared, as did the incidence of ‘melancholia’, many cases of which ...”

“... exists, they usually point to its cars, those Eisenhower-era Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Plymouths, held together by Cuban ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a ...”

“... style is fluid but all too unvarying. He tends to begin a paragraph by paraphrasing some commonly held view of the English: ‘Removing the lower-class Englishman from his own environment evidently had the effect of loosening his moral moorings’; ‘The English were proud of their lack of vindictiveness’; ‘For the English the most savage war seemed a ...”

“... letters (especially those in the 1930s) under trying circumstances. His wife, for whom he still held strong feelings, had deserted him for another man and had aborted the child of a third; his mother had died; he was forced to undergo a bleak exile in Shetland separated from his children and his books and papers; and he had suffered a nervous collapse ...”

“... of his 30th birthday, he was elevated to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge – once held by the equally precocious Isaac Newton. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with Schrödinger, and remains one of the youngest recipients. Though he was by no means finished as a physicist by this point – he continued to produce ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... waiters, until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”