“... was an abundance. We brought order wherever we went’), or a female avenger, at times a Bruce Lee in drag. She defeats a giant, who changes into his true shape, a snake – whereupon his disgusted soldiers pledge their loyalty to her. Her followers, she remarks in a nice aside, never knew she was a woman: ‘Chinese executed women who disguised themselves ...”

“... me her devotion for the rest of her life.’In England, Geoffrey took up the post of warden of Lee Abbey, a Christian evangelical community on Exmoor; later the family moved to Hull, where he became a bishop, and then to Bradford. This upbringing was sheltered, unworldly and spartan: the exactions of a pastor’s family life, borne uncomplainingly, can be ...”

“... Captain Thompson – ‘motionless, remote and enigmatical’ – piled on the agony with fog, a lee-shore and a lost anchor cable, Conrad explained that he would ‘back the bow anchor and tail the heaviest hawser on board on the end of the chain before letting go, and if she parted from that, which is quite likely, I would just do nothing. She would have ...”

“... with royalists, and indeed fell in love with one of them, Annette Vallon, the mother of his first child, whose counter-revolutionary activities are recorded in surviving police archives. Personal connection isn’t the same as political conviction, but by the time of the September Massacres of 1792, Wordsworth was clearly questioning his early enthusiasm for ...”

“... ones above and the smallest below.’ This is typical. Absolutely precise and sensible, but with a child’s intensity and close-up. Aksakov (1791-1859) published his book in 1847, then produced a ‘considerably enlarged’ version in 1854. It was his earliest venture into print (he had started to go blind and had retired early from government service), and ...”

“... while the arduous labour of mastering the language discouraged young men from getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, and other delinquencies lamented by Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd. Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well controlled that hangovers were virtually unknown. The large numbers of male prostitutes in evidence called for ...”

“... café where the tiny, deaf Adolf Loos (‘ornament is crime’) held court; he knew Man Ray and Lee Miller; Berthold Lubetkin lived in the same building; he was good friends with the photographers Andor Kertész and Bill Brandt as well as most of the leading painters and sculptors. But an enduring sense of his own superiority (as a ...”

“... say, between father-in-law and daughter-in-law – while others are tales of paedophilia and ‘child molestation’. Another popular subject of which Delhi residents will be well aware are the crimes committed by the ‘criminal castes’, often linked in the neocolonial imagination of the city’s bourgeoisie to the villages and smallholdings that are ...”

“... next to me in United economy? A pretty polyester twin-set? Diamantine best friends? A husband? A child? Panty hose? A tolerance for abuse? Sequinned nipple pasties? The lipstick on the corpse? All of the above? Tomboy no good. Tomboy pathetic. One had somehow imbibed the message early on. One was not complete (whatever that meant) and never would be. For ...”

“... procedure, a way of getting through the week. There was ‘a world inside the world’, as Lee Harvey Oswald kept saying in Libra. And then one day there wasn’t. The world was just the world, a vast clutter of causes and coincidences. The underworld emptied itself onto the streets, and mere suspicion began to seem naive, a form of reverse ...”

“... in English at Cambridge; in Italy she was educated mostly by her parents. She said later that as a child she had assumed she would grow up to be a boy, and her fiction touches on themes of gender fluidity. Her novel of 1923, Told by an Idiot, was compared to Orlando. In these pieces the tone is closer to The Waves. Her six brothers and sisters, to whom ...”

“... maiden name. Lorna Garman nearly supplemented the many romances in the book: when her lover Laurie Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not ...”

“... tour in Denmark in June 1965 contacted the Stones office ... saying she had just given birth to my child. I consulted my diaries and found she was two months out with her calculations, and her arithmetic was politely corrected. Nothing further,’ Wyman is pleased to confirm, ‘was ever heard from her’. He is also concerned to share a month-by-month check ...”