“... Hall in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20). Irving’s was the first, and by no means the last, American contribution to the idealisation of the English country house. He tells us that the architecture and furnishings of Bracebridge Hall had not been altered since the Restoration and that its owner regretted that he had not been born two ...”

“... The folds of gold satin fall elegantly around the body and the balance of Van Dyck’s composition means our gaze is drawn to the black sash tied just off-centre at the queen’s waist; crucially, below that, her hands are joined in a cradling gesture over her abdomen. She seems to offer her womb to the viewer: a royal pregnancy is after all a public ...”

“... Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing teacher and human resources nightmare:Wild rumours circulated about this seminar. It was said ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... when he sang, ‘He’ll sure write his name up and down your back,’ House replied: ‘That means beat you up.’) Seth plays the song to Carter; they both find it ‘mesmerising’. They stay up until six in the morning, ‘cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words’, filtering out the background noise until they have ‘a clear a ...”

“... bore sacred images in precisely that space. Readers working their way through the book could watch David or Job, the suffering Christ, the Virgin or the Trinity drawing nearer or receding from them as they prayed. Manuscripts bear telltale signs of their use. In fact, book historians love the sloppy readers who would have pained librarians of old. Marginal ...”

“... books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with the title arca libraria, but what that means is, clearly, ‘book-box’. Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his ...”

“... nor is there any discussion of the difficulty of tracking changes in emotional life by means of a new genre whose appearance is said to coincide with those changes. Since there are no 17th-century domestic novels to use as comparisons, how would we know if the late 18th century’s novels are registering new phenomena? The marriage plot, the ...”

“... use of tax havens by virtually every major global bank and multinational business has nullified David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage. Fundamentalist advocates of a no-holds-barred approach to free trade have persistently turned a blind eye to this problem. For those like Baker – and myself – who believe that free and fair trade can ...”

“... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...”

“... refers to him as ‘that other detective … the sad one’, no one has to ask which one she means. A stocky man in his fifties, shabbily dressed, rumpled from sleeping in an armchair, he lives on ‘cold boiled sheep head’ and ‘tubs of curds’. He kills time by browsing in his book collection – mostly accounts of ‘missing persons in ...”

“... that such attacks have done the Government any electoral good at all. To spend more, of course, means to tax more. As with spending, there have been surreptitious (or, like increases in petrol tax, would-be surreptitious) increases in taxation; but underspending can probably only be corrected, given the Government’s reluctance to borrow more, by increases ...”

“... a powerful critic of the confessional fiscal-military states of 18th-century Europe, Britain by no means excluded. Smith complained of their ‘public prodigality and misconduct’, their ‘expensive and unnecessary wars’, their ‘great fleets and armies’. Nor did he care for the national prejudices which accompanied, and ...”

“... a major role in modern Hebrew prose, partly because it is an aestheticised (civilised, liberal) means of choking off the Other’s voice, leaving him or her the right to speak only on condition that the ‘I’ has the final say. Yet, when Oz speaks to himself, about himself, for the first time in his long public career, he sounds more sincere than he ever ...”