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“... incidents he prefers to gloss over. Ferguson had a share in the horse with the Irish businessman John Magnier, a very wealthy man whose interests (in conjunction with his associate J.P. McManus) ranged from stud farms to currency trading. What started out as a bit of fun turned deadly serious once Rock of Gibraltar began winning race after race, making him ...”

“... believe that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too ...”

“... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...”

“... Airport in business class, and return to Paris or Düsseldorf three days later without having set foot in any part of India other than Gurgaon. It is this world that Adiga sets out to dissect in the most ambitious part of the book. Balram lives in the servants’ apartments in Buckingham Towers B Block. It is, as he describes it, part of a ‘warren of ...”

“... storeys up, a captain in a smart grey wool coat sat behind a big desk in a corner office watching John Travolta in Be Cool. At least he had turned up for work; much of the Libyan police force now exists only on paper. A colonel in the internal intelligence service told me that he, and every other high-ranking officer he knows, shows up once a week to pick up ...”

“... an exemption from the arcane law against cross-dressing; for her grandest composition, the 17-foot long Horse Fair, she attended the equine auctions near the Salpêtrière on Wednesdays and Saturdays, always disguised as a man. Unveiled at the Salon of 1853, Horse Fair was hailed as a ‘picture of the century’; it toured widely in Britain and the ...”

“... system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set foot in Egypt in 1828, on an expedition sponsored by the Duke of Tuscany, and felt ‘as if he had come home’. His ‘swarthy complexion and excellent Arabic meant that he could easily pass for a native’, Wilkinson writes, echoing Champollion’s own claim to ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... the architectural history of various subway systems and the theory of names as it developed from John Stuart Mill to Saul Kripke, with, by way of comparison, a solid account of necronym taboos among various tribes. Films, photographs and museum exhibits are everywhere used in evidence, as is an enormous range of recondite archival material. As the founder ...”

“... But even ‘figure’ seems too fixed a term for the melancholic, at times clownish narrator. John Berryman – one of Housman’s most creative readers, working him deeply into the fabric of The Dream Songs – catches something Housmanish in his prefatory disclaimer: ‘The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an ...”

“... those low pentagonal stools on the sloping rubberised side of which the customer placed his or her foot, over which Aunty’s head would be reverently bent about to unlace the shoe. Coyly she looks up. ‘Have I,’ she says in those exaggeratedly correct tones of which she was so proud and which marked her out as a professional woman, ‘Have I the pleasure ...”

“... there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their foot, the familiar declining whine of a clean, brightly lit underground train. We got in; the carriage was full of neatly dressed Armenians who were, in spite of everything, going somewhere – commuting. We travelled two stops, to the centre of town. I ...”

“... years without carving in an Africanesque mode before returning to the fold to fashion the ten-foot-high King of Kings (c.1938, now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York) with no self-consciousness, it seems, quite possibly sculpting to jazz, since he’d built up a first-rate record collection, mainly of blacks (including Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher ...”

“... House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaffe on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the ...”