“... selling them armoured vehicles at an inflated price. McChrystal was also invited by General Doug Brown, as the head of Special Operations Command his boss between 2003 and 2007, to join the board of a Virginia-based company called Knowledge International. KI’s uninformative website doesn’t mention that it’s the US arm of a UAE-based firm set up by a ...”

“... people at home and abroad. Yet neither is considered to be a novelist in the sense that, say, Elizabeth Bowen is. Her novel of 1929, The Last September, is also a lament for a vanishing class, that of the highly privileged Anglo-Irish ascendancy. In describing the three novels of those two years in this way – as chronicles of disaster – we blur one of ...”

“... was much debate about whether or not it was a Good Thing. For Protestants, England’s saviour was Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen who had reigned alone and made her reluctance to marry an instrument of foreign policy. Hence, on top of everything else, the devoutly Lutheran Albert had to contend with persistent rumours that he was a Roman Catholic. He was still ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... to charming ingrates. In any event, like a Depression-era mother in a James Cagney film, Elizabeth couldn’t see the bad in her boy. The worse he got, the more she wanted to camouflage him with medals, rosettes and ribbons. The irony is that he treated her as badly as he treated every other woman, flogging Sunninghill, the house she gave him as a ...”

“... day he called her in. ‘He looked at me,’ Stead wrote many years later. ‘He had beautiful brown eyes ... and he looked at me with absolute astonishment.’ The story of Christina Stead’s life is also the story of Bill Blake’s. They lived together unmarried for 23 years until his first wife gave him a divorce, and remained together until he died in ...”

“... utterances – ‘you are now husband and wife’; ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ – make themselves true by being uttered.) In part, Callon has in mind loosely ‘economic’ practices such as marketing and accountancy, and the Enron scandal has certainly focused attention on how key data such as firms’ earnings are ...”

“... balancing on the balls of her feet (too wordy).And in her discussion of her story ‘Nancy Brown Will Be in Town’, which is made up of ten short sentences, based on an email she once received, Davis makes a numbered list of the formal problems it posed, focusing particularly on the order of the last two sentences:Instead of ‘We have enjoyed her ...”

“... people a week. Patel quotes the Indian writer Dom Moraes:Daily they came in their hundreds, a brown tide scumbling over London Airport … They came with trunks and baskets, pathetic sacks tied with rope, satchels, cardboard cartons and all the goods they could carry. Gratefully they stepped onto British soil, glad … that they had reached a place they ...”

“... on Havana cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ...”

“... There are fewer than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it ...”

“... from Margaret Dashwood, or Interference (a sequel to Sense and Sensibility by Edith Charlotte Brown, 1929) to Consequence, or Whatever Became of Charlotte Lucas (Elizabeth Newark, 1997) and Desire & Duty: A Sequel to Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Ted Bader and Marilyn Bader, 1997) have appeared in ...”

“... anti-Edwardian manifesto for the examination of consciousness in fiction, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but the surly provincial in me – dare I say it, my inner Lawrence – can hardly help cheering when he writes: ‘The essay was originally delivered as a paper to a Cambridge undergraduate society, and it reverberates with the mirth of upper-class ...”

“... but I am with you. After a routine summons to self-sacrifice – ‘whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots’ – he unleashed the maxim that will guide his policy: From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign ...”

“... him. Mathematically sharp, he yearned to be an economist. Among the activists in Nairobi was Sara Elizabeth Mooney, a 43-year-old Texan and literacy teacher, who offered Barack a job as her secretary. He cultivated an academic look, with horn-rimmed glasses and pipe. Mooney found him exceptionally promising: his ebullience, his self-confidence and his ...”