“... army, Wagner, likes to make videos. In one, he stands on the roof of a building a few miles north of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Wagner and the Russian army spent weeks trying to capture. Prigozhin has a particular style for these short, social media-optimised clips. He speaks in clear, simple Russian, the close-up of his heavy, fleshy ...”

“... auxiliaries. This is also true of Sunday’s Well Magdalene Laundry in Cork: the nuns are in the north-east corner, in neat rows with a neat cross for each; the auxiliaries are in a mass grave, now vandalised, in an overgrown and inaccessible part of the complex. Ordinary Magdalenes were buried in the local public cemetery, though anxiety persists about the ...”

“... sharing the enthusiasm of Sarkozy, who was eager to reassert French imperial prerogatives in North Africa. The Franco-American friendship began with a mishap. Walking up the stairs of the Elysée palace, Clinton stepped out of her shoe; Sarkozy ‘gracefully took my hand and helped me regain my footing’. She sent him a photo of the incident ...”

“... different course. Clark attacks this problem by continuously revolving his narrative like a lazy Susan in a restaurant. After pages about Naples and the Bourbon kingdom come news from Austria at roughly the same point, then Hungary, followed by the situations in Wallachia and Croatia, Bohemia, Prussia, Vienna, Paris … Each will return later in the ...”

“... Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for ...”

“... have picked up from reading Emerson or the ever-devious Hawthorne. His contentions are that in the North-Eastern United States before the Civil War ‘the reigning ideology of manhood oriented itself toward power, not feeling’ – such dichotomies abound, alas; that the ideology took hold, less because men were afraid of women or of the feminine components ...”

“... mind: what he called, in its raw, ‘unspoiled’ state, ‘la pensée sauvage’. Lévi-Strauss, Susan Sontag claimed in 1963, had ‘invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation’. Whether it was anthropology at all is debatable; that it was a remarkable effort to ask the Big Questions is not. Leach grudgingly conceded that ...”

“... became pregnant, they decided to come back to England, moving into a flat in Chalcot Square in North London in January 1960. Frieda was born at home and had her first bath in Sylvia’s biggest pyrex dish. ‘I don’t know when I’ve been so happy,’ she wrote home. Ted had held a mirror so she could see Frieda being born, and wrote to a friend that the ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... this uncelebrated railway halt, navigates by revulsion. Starting on Tottenham Court Road, he heads north, always choosing the worst option when the path divides. ‘Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time … Here the city gives up the game.’ It wasn’t just Tebbit who ...”

“... say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an opportunity to see what all the ...”

“... for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who but an effete Westerner would ...”

“... pools, ‘the palm trees, the heat … the wallpaper that looked like bricks’. In Sausalito, north of San Francisco, she discovered a long-lost cousin, Jean Varda, known as ‘Yanco’. He lived in a houseboat, which he moored among a floating enclave of hippies. He was the father she ‘had always dreamed of’, drawn, like her, to bricolage and ...”

“... with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of violent talk who opposes violence when it touches the ...”

“... was awry, he would rush off to look for his diary with the yellow Post-it. This was his polar north, and as long as it could be located, he seemed to be in contact, just, with a reality that was slipping away. Sometimes he would lose the Post-it and painstakingly write out a new one. Gradually, he lost track of the way the letters were organised, and the ...”