“... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...”

“... of no use because by merely throwing a sponge soaked in a variety of colours at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which could be seen a beautiful landscape ... And the painter in question makes very sorry landscapes.’ Primavera’a glowing oranges and colourful Tuscan spring flowers demand ...”

“... narrative. Drawing on elements as disparate as Alexander Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales and Stephen Hecht’s scholarly paper ‘Tobacco Carcinogens, Their Biomarkers and Tobacco-Induced Cancer’, Red Plenty is a seamless pastiche. It takes the long view of Soviet history, although Spufford’s view is highly selective. Sputniks and cosmonauts go ...”

“... councillors, simply because it barely existed in 2022 when these seats were last up for election. Stephen Fisher, a polling expert at Oxford, calculates that Reform would have to make a net gain of 2050 council seats to demonstrate that they have retained last year’s momentum. They have fallen short of that benchmark, and behind his lamprey-like ...”

“... Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?’ I once saw that quote printed on a wall at the Tate in an exhibition on war photography. I sent a picture of it to my parents, who were visiting Harrison at his ranch in Borrego Springs, California. It elicited a groan.Harrison was my mentor, or, as he preferred it, I was his ‘little ...”

“... experience, rendered possible by teamwork on the part of Science, Art and Labour. According to Stephen Haliday’s The Great Stink of London, published earlier this year, 827,000 persons used the water closets installed for the Great Exhibition, ‘many visitors no doubt experiencing the device for the first time’. How and why the authorities counted ...”

“... income tax or the levy on land values advocated by the Webbs and others, the writing was on the wall for their autonomy. Describing the British system of government to Germans in 1903, Josef Redlich was amazed that central and local authorities were equal before the law. The corollary, of course, was an absence of constitutional safeguard, as Davis’s ...”

“... It was important to mix up the pages and magazines, so that page 20 might be high in a north wall and 21 on the bottom of the south wall. I believe this was my first lesson in literature, in the infinite possibilities of creativity. What I knew for sure was that his walls were a great idea. He would have read through ...”

“... making a joke.In 2022, Twitter was fifteen years old, glitzy and intermittently profitable, but Wall Street wasn’t impressed that it was still so much smaller than Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, and also less adept at adding new features or selling advertising (the source of most of its income). When Musk sent the Twitter board his ‘best ...”

“... and missiles were used to destroy surveillance sites and command and control posts while the wall was breached with bulldozers and explosives. Most striking was the adoption of both the tactics and the aesthetic of US and Israeli special forces (the Qassam Brigades referred to its Nukhba units as ‘commandos’). All told, the attacks left 725 Israeli ...”

“... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...”

“... and bobbed hair, and I simply can’t bring myself to do that.’ He found his best friend in Stephen Tennant, who, Rex thought, overdid the make-up later in life. ‘We’ve got rather a “case”,’ he wrote at the time – the Haileybury term for a love affair between boys. Twelve years later he added: ‘thank God it grew and lasted all this ...”

“... knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus … At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionising event. When I thought about it that way … it was incredibly easy to make the ...”

“... authors at the trial,’ Collins stated, ‘that they have created their own social circle.’ Stephen Rubin of Bantam books observed that ‘the media have become part of the story,’ and Collins explained the ‘self-feeding phenomenon’ of the Steinberg Book craze – how a reviewer of Brownmiller’s book herself received two book-offers to write ...”

“... as he watches the Politburo, their ‘plastic faces all puffed up, twisted’ and ‘a high wall just collapsed inside his heart. His soul emptied; his brain paralysed … a sentence of death … a realisation of his powerlessness.’ In the months that followed someone decided that separation was not enough. All traces must be removed. Miss Xuan and ...”