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“... had now discovered the work she was born to do; each book thereafter was an erudite game and she took great pleasure in it, testing her own intelligence and the intelligence of her readers, now a much reduced party. It probably did not help her British sales that in 1968 she moved to Paris, taught linguistics and related subjects, and was soon in close touch ...”

“... preceding Classes’. Even this relatively simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...”

“... pet, was unmarried at nearly twenty-five – ‘a queer little fish’, a feminist, when he took her to Rome in 1889. She had permission (she was musical) to play the organ at St Peter’s. Among the listeners was a middle-aged Prussian officer, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. The Count admired her and pursued her through Europe, but to ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... imagination, and went so far as to doubt whether his works should be called poetry. Matthew Arnold took this line further, dismissing Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’. Attacks on Pope’s morals also continued in the 19th century: C.W. Dilke was shocked to discover that Pope had ‘cooked’ a few letters in his published correspondence by ...”

“... Not O’Malley, however; briefly elected to the Dáil as a symbol of resistance, he never really took part in its proceedings, retaining the old IRA-man’s suspicion of ‘politics’. His return to his medical studies didn’t work out either. From the mid-Twenties, increasingly disillusioned, he travelled in Spain and Italy, subsisting on small handouts ...”

“... way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to continue. When, twenty years later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first American President born in this century, stood and took the oath of office it seemed to many of his fellow countrymen that the stewardship of daring had finally found its vindicator. The great ...”

“... the end came she was desperately sorry to be leaving him. Of the younger men coming to the fore, John Gollan, Pollitt’s successor – though the latter continued to dominate, she believes – was a likeable character; and George Matthews (still active today) seemed, as he did to everyone, a man full of ‘earnest honesty’. The Party set up in 1920 was ...”

“... when he did listen he had an infallible prescription for staving off the menace. The prescription took the simple form of doing what the Tories would have done ten years before – but of trying to square it with the Unions. The end-result was a sort of Weimar without the sex: the country mortgaged to the IMF; placemanship and jobbery everywhere from the ...”

“... circuitous route, adaptation had come around to at least the prospect of elimination. Few people took Reagan’s rhetoric seriously, until Mikhail Gorbachev sensed, on meeting the President for the first time in Geneva in 1985, that he might actually mean what he was saying. The new Soviet leader tested this possibility with a proposal for the outright ...”

“... taxonomists who gave the names to the fossils. Suppose that in some lineage evolutionary change took place at a more or less steady rate, to such an extent that the earliest and latest forms are sufficiently different to warrant their being placed in different species. If there is at some point a gap in the record, because suitable deposits were not being ...”

“... Behymer Dorn died of pancreatic cancer, on the cusp of the millennium, in December 1999. He took his alien, the tumour, with him. Which, as he reported in ‘The Decadron, Tagamit, Benadryl and Taxol Cocktail Party of 1 March 1999’, from Chemo Sábe, gave him considerable satisfaction. The tumour was interested in what interested him, but not ...”