“... it was possible for people to redeem themselves by their own efforts. The followers of Mother Anne Lee, Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes were all, in different ways, antinomian perfectionists who considered themselves free to challenge or abandon existing norms (particularly sexual ones) and to create new ones based on their own idiosyncratic readings of ...”

“... camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George ...”

“... remember?). In 1993 The Fugitive was made into a huge action movie with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, and then briefly resuscitated in modern dress for TV and DVD in 2001. In the original, the story starts before the series begins. Richard Kimble, a paediatrician, got home one night, having left to cool down after an argument with his wife about her ...”

“... the town believe that they are already the victims of an ongoing, cumulative disaster. As Judith Lee, a social worker, puts it, ‘there is no money being invested here, no jobs and no industry.’ Her caseload includes more and more people with such desperate problems as eviction, homelessness, domestic violence and debt. ‘Ten years ago, I could have done ...”

“... status with charm and good humour’. Henderson introduced Hamilton to Roland Penrose and Lee Miller, the power couple who both supported the IG and exposed Hamilton to Duchamp – most importantly, to The Green Box, the book of notes detailing the making of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a.k.a. The Large Glass. At this ...”

“... Bess Lomax, the children of America’s most distinguished folk-music scholars. Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays had regional middle-class roots; the songwriter Millard Lampell was the child of immigrant Jewish garment workers. Providing themselves with invented proletarian pedigrees or Southern backgrounds, the group performed ...”

“... all the rest of it. This is perhaps a trifle unfair to the good work done previously by Hermione Lee and Victoria Glendinning, to name but two more orthodox critics: but it does indeed help – and very strikingly – to remove Bowen from the socially feminine personality on which her admirers used fondly to dote, and see how far she can run without her ...”

“... self-denial enforced on women in patriarchal society. Not only does she show Sibella, innocent child of the forest, freely ‘giving’ herself to the worldly Clement, she has her defend the union – which will result in pregnancy and her death in childbirth – with a strikingly Wollstonecraftian appeal to natural law. Society’s petty rules do not ...”

“... loyalty to the agencies. Whoever was going to accept responsibility for what happened at the Child Support Agency, it was not going to be the ministers who designed an institution fundamentally flawed at its inception. Whatever their functional defects, the agencies (and the quangos) nevertheless serve their purpose of depoliticising executive authority ...”

“... tended to produce the routine dynastic hazards of minorities (‘Woe to the land whose king is a child!’), succession disputes, and recurrent internecine conflict, all of which hampered state formation. Jordan sees the Latin Church, for which he often uses ‘the Papacy’ as a synonym, as setting Europe on a new trajectory. His chapters on the ...”

“... product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a ...”

“... and what Clarke called his ‘golden nugget’, nasty WhatsApp chitchat about gays and women and Lee Rigby and postings of an image of a toilet roll imprinted with the Israeli flag. But even Clarke concluded that none of this amounted to ‘terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism’. The Education Committee’s inquiry found another incident it deemed ...”

“... grievous blow when his first wife, Mary Ezra, ran away in 1935, leaving him at 28 with their child. Thereafter, even though he remarried during the war, he tended to appear more completely at home in a bar: he was the most compulsively gregarious of loners. Though he knew Auden by the mid-Thirties, and had known Spender since Oxford and Anthony Blunt ...”

“... while posterity figures out what to do with him.Born in 1932 and raised in Pennsylvania, a child of the Depression, Updike reached prominence during the Kennedy era as American literature’s princely elf, his Jiminy Cricket nose peering down with amusement, his tall, gangly frame having the lanky assurance of someone preparing to sink a basket from ...”

“... them) and some with less. Bernard Berenson, Janet Ross (Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen) and Vernon Lee were their near neighbours and friends. In Florence there were English banks and English doctors, English shops where you could buy tea and mackintoshes. This art-loving, literary Anglo-American community in Italy had complex relationships with actual ...”