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“... Jack Straw was lamenting that ‘in the last six years, every serious newspaper has abandoned its straight reporting of Parliament.’ Almost overnight, a tradition that dated back to the Victorian era of devoting a page or more every day to coverage of the most important speeches delivered in the House had simply vanished. Much had been hoped from the ...”

“... Protestant family in Scranton, a declining coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. She didn’t go straight to university, but moved instead to New York with her sister, Betty, and managed with impressive speed to carve out a career as a copywriter and freelance journalist – at first she got most of her commissions from a metallurgy trade journal, Iron ...”

“... of extinction. Massive apartment blocks modelled on those of the Soviet Union and hotels straight from the American Midwest are transforming the Syrian capital into an Occidental artefact. Oriental structures, struggling under the weight of satellite receivers large enough for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near ...”

“... to the curious reader rather than the predatory journalist or academic), he declines to give a straight answer but offers a tantalising clue: since he falls into ‘the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act’, he felt ‘the need to be ill-equipped’ in order to write. Because he ...”

“... you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight routes through which water can move fast and hard, cutting the channels wider and eroding this coast still further. ‘Nature meanders but time is money,’ a bayou-dweller told me. About a football field of coastline erodes away every 45 minutes, and a ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without ...”

“... of Walter Benjamin above all; with European cinema, from Murnau through Leni Riefenstahl to Michael Haneke; with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes down, and the horrors that ...”

“... projections depict a better than real vision of uniform crescents inspired by Bath, and long straight avenues out of Haussmann, all wrapped in a green buffer of newly planted woodland with a strip of river frontage ‘accessible for walks and cycling as well as bird and seal watching’.This is good news for ex-industrial settlements struggling with debt ...”

“... three gables, two of them hipped, an eyebrow dormer like a lewd wink, thick thatch, an absence of straight lines and orthodox geometry, leaded lights and a quite exceptional abundance of ersatz beams and chimneys. Its improbable neighbour was Robert van ’t Hoff, a member of De Stijl and author of Lloyd Wright inspired villas near Utrecht, of Augustus ...”

“... he’d rushed out without his passport. Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to ...”

“... some of the vices that Weber detects in the irresponsible politician? The American philosopher Michael Walzer, writing in 1973, in the immediate aftermath of another misjudged imperial war, detected in Weber’s ‘mature, superbly trained, relentless, objective, responsible and disciplined political leader’ a recognisable type: the type of the ...”

“... they tried to haul full carriages up an incline. Geologically, the tunnels could have been mostly straight, but even though the Tube was far below the surface – 15 to 35 metres – such was the fear of undermining private property that the engineers sent them along the lines of streets wherever possible, sometimes even stacking two tunnels on top of each ...”

“... whale’ fetching an American sloop-of-war ‘such a thwack that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest port to heave down and repair.’ Then there’s the famous story of the Essex, sunk to the west of the Galapagos Islands in 1820. Owen Chase, its Chief Mate, published a Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... others – ‘True and False Self’ and ‘The Use of an Object’ – are lifted straight from Winnicott’s writing. Bechdel tells us his life story, lays his 18 reasons out on the page (reminding us that he was ‘revolutionary’ for using ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ decades before anyone else). She also graphically pursues him ...”