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“... When Gary Gilmore faced his executioners one cold morning in 1977, there was a serious, anxious, bearded reporter-type standing only a few feet away. Before the hood was placed over Gilmore’s head, the man walked over to the chair, and took both of the killer’s hands into his own. ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ he said ...”

“... people would call low-hanging fruit – easy, juicy targets. Mailman’s insufferable counsellor Gary Garrity, for example: ‘Always his concern. That solicitous nod. That knowing frown.’ Or bumper stickers: ‘They shout their opinions into the void because they’re afraid someone will hear them.’ Or Maurice Renault, Nestor’s pretentious New Age ...”

“... that had been hidden beneath a damp grey carpet and deciphered the mysterious indentations as marks made by high heels. Behind a cordon, I glimpsed the bottom of a grand staircase. Macfarlane explained that while the stalls had been converted into squash courts and the foyer into an amusement arcade, the balcony, café and projection room had been sealed ...”

“... must, both in order to provide a climactic finale, and because the end of the chronicles marks the end of an era when such an enterprise could plausibly prosper: based on the extraction of raw materials from an empire and run by family members with no particular aptitude for it, paternalistic and lacking entrepreneurial vision. The Cazalet men ...”

“... For the Paris Review.’ ‘People forget how good a stylist Norman is – like in that book about Gary Gilmore. He really got the nothingness of that place, the nothing.’ ‘The loneliness of Utah out there.’ ‘The West,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s always interested me and he was the one that got it.’ The next day I walked through a healthy ...”

“... No force at all, only a glitch in the transmission, the meaningless celluloid stutter of Gary Trudeau’s merciless caricature, Ron Headrest. The President moved smoothly from presumptive facts to stories, a realm where he has always been more at home. ‘It is our gift,’ he said, ‘to have visions, and I want to share that of a young boy who ...”

“... bought them in the market two or three flowers would scent a room). But florists (and certainly Marks and Spencer) have now bred a strain which has no scent at all except faintly that of pepper. Considering this is a flower which is not much to look at, the whole point of which is its scent, this must be considered a triumph of marketing. 24 ...”

“... One​ of the things that marks out ‘post-truth’ – the word of 2016, according to Oxford Dictionaries, which defined it as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ – as originally an American concept is the fact that in Britain the press has been pushing fake news for decades ...”

“... as I freely do the demeaning, that’s fine. Still, one might persist in asking what in general marks the process of corruption, and what makes it a bad thing. Perhaps when an activity gets corrupted, its internal goal – the activity’s essential point – is frustrated. So with medicine, say, the internal goal is curing people; this goal is frustrated ...”

“... of each stair: Nikki’s head had bounced off them one by one. The camera then followed the drag marks from the bottom of the staircase through the basement into the room where she was found lying on her left-hand side. It hovered over the pixellated heap in the far right-hand corner just long enough to take in the emerald green of her T-shirt, before ...”

“... just like a boat!’ The younger Utzon hoped to follow his father’s profession, but poor school marks, the result of dyslexia, ruled that out and incidentally added Utzon’s name to the long list, headed by Albert Einstein, of brilliant dyslexics, as well as planting some unjustified sense of inadequacy deep in his personality. Two artist friends of his ...”

“... some special territory? Had there been a football match? Were we being punished for the skills of Gary Lineker? As we run, I feel a heavy blow on the top of my head, the blow struck with a short length of steel scaffolding which Rupert sees the fair-haired youth pick up from the ground. Fortunately, the scaffolding doesn’t come instantly to hand, and he has ...”

“... such as Sigrid Nunez (Sempre Susan), Phillip Lopate (Notes on Sontag), Edmund White (City Boy), Gary Indiana (Utopia’s Debris) and others recorded first-hand: that Sontag was incapable of spending much time alone, even when writing. These were not cosy evenings in. ‘Every night’s dinner provided an opportunity for new guests, along with Susan and ...”

“... in 1966 – middle-aged, chap-fallen, penniless and still addicted, his numerous scars and track marks supplemented with a conglomeration of scary and absurd prison tattoos. He describes these droll insigniae in a typically deadpan passage in his autobiography: One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He’d take ...”

“... one of the roads leading out of town.’ ‘He was happy. He seemed cheerful,’ says Guardsman Gary Alderson, who was next to Wakefield in the snatch. ‘Seemed happy all the way round. I was facing rearwards, he was facing forwards.’ Two hundred metres short of the zone called Green 6 there was a loud explosion and what some of the soldiers describe as ...”