“... waistcoat. A sonic equivalent of such mingling and alteration can be heard in the mixed rhythms of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, which captures a history of influence in a number dedicated to the bowler hat.Traditional fabrics bring unifying stories. The most distinctive Hawaiian material, kapa or barkcloth, was wonderfully versatile, used for ...”

“... this century the body of statute law has broken the surface at many points, forming sometimes small islands – such as the unnecessary but minor incursion of the legislature into the judge-made law of judicial review – and sometimes great land-masses like the modern law of real property, supplanting the common law and equity, or whole continents of ...”

“... the defeated Dixie soldiers who took refuge in Latin America after the war and started small slave colonies. Their Brazilian descendants honour them with fancy-dress pageants.The first signs of a new American dispensation came with Woodrow Wilson, who considered Central America a field for democratic tutelage, with interventions between 1913 and ...”

“... killed at Inkerman or Balaclava, rather than on the Somme, was, in statistical terms, extremely small. But that of course is just the oddity of history, and of the consciousness in which it resides at any given moment. Paul Scott would never have made such an apparent faux pas; his sense of historical timing is always quietly immaculate. But Farrell’s ...”

“... develop, and to earn some of the wealth that industrialised nations now possess. Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks’s book, the first attempt in recent years to examine African views of China, makes clear that there is hunger in Africa for a new partner. Though they are cautious about the negative impact of China’s rise, and wary of the way China treats its ...”

“... grateful, for she looked after the widowed Mansfield in his last years, and he left her a small legacy to add to the large one from her father. After his death Dido married, had three sons, and died in her early forties. She is sensitively portrayed in the recently released film Belle, which goes to great lengths to recreate time and place (much of it ...”

“... discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge being that they provided ‘a rationale for a Cold War struggle that ...”

“... month his wife had been arrested by the Vichy police and deported to the German death camps. Their small daughter, Claire, who was saved by neighbours, this summer saw Maurice Papon, who was responsible for her mother’s deportation, released after less than three years in prison. On a summer’s day in 1944, with France newly liberated, Henri ...”

“... Kingsley Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ...”

“... been few outstanding Marlowe revivals in the 21st century, and his plays have been put on only in small venues. The second half of Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus led its audience through the centre of Chichester, where the Seven Deadly Sins had staked out appropriate shops (Gluttony took over the Real Cornish Pasty Company); in the cathedral, the damnation of ...”

“... public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and space) were profoundly altered and extended in the thirty years before the First World War. The scope of these books is very different: one straddles the centuries; the other delves into ...”

“... voiced against the French Communist Party, make an affirmative answer distressingly plausible. Stephen Wilson’s large and learned book, in which he studies the political, social and intellectual aspects of anti-semitism in France at the end of the 19th century, is therefore very timely, as is the reprinting of Dreyfus’s recollections of his conviction ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... to this anthology, which could have been presented in quite a different way. Edna O’Brien’s small-town girl was fascinated, as a child, by the two grotesque Miss Connors, Miss Lucy and drunken Miss Amy. When she comes home on an awkward visit from England with her short-tempered husband, he makes their little boy return Miss Amy’s gift of sweeties ...”

“... its beak was ‘crooked’ or ‘streight’; then, if straight, was the fowl large, medium or small in size? If medium, was its beak strong and thick, or short and small? Through this process of elimination, the reader would eventually be guided towards the smallest groupings, with the final criterion prompting ...”