“... in Bengal and the neighbouring states of Orissa and Bihar (for Calcutta continues to be the major metropolis in Eastern India), not to speak of the continued migrations from poverty-stricken Bangladesh, and one begins to get some idea of where the destitute that Mother Teresa lifts up from the pavements come from. Two facts should be mentioned in this ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... would all this end? Were the churches themselves safe? And this was happening in the midst of a major political crisis at the centre: the old and discarded queen (Catherine of Aragon) dead, the new one (Anne Boleyn) decapitated, an indecently hasty third royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King ...”

“... Beard, however, is at Newnham. Textual twins, avatars and the vicarious, are one of the book’s major themes. The medium is very definitely the message. Or take hard-case Hartmut, and his partner Heidi, from Heidelberg, an expert in church history, apparently, who requested his identity to be withheld. His long letters contain the most devastating ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... extremely well done and exciting to read, even for those who remember who won. His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the caricature that popular history has handed down. He writes effectively about the ins and outs of economic policy, charting the complex conflicts between One Nation ...”

“... 1980s by such outfits as KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), Carlyle and Blackstone.Abraaj was soon a major player in parts of the world that are problematically described as ‘emerging’ or ‘frontier’ markets. It bought out Aramex (a Jordanian courier firm), Karachi Electric (a utility company) and Spinneys, which operates supermarkets across the Arab ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1961) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett ...”

“... to deal with the equally relentless productivity of the Dickens industry? Since his best friend John Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens (1871-76), the vagaries of Dickens’s life and the brilliance of his writing have led to countless attempts to interpret, diagnose or explain the man through the writing, or the writing through the man. Certain ...”

“... for Saturday Night. Based on a book by Julius Epstein (one of the screenwriting twins who were major contributors to Casablanca), and set in 1929, it told the story of a group of young men who try to make a killing on the stock market. It was that show, and his sharp lyrics, that got Sondheim invited to collaborate on West Side Story (1957), where he ...”

“... the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the Liberal Nationals changed their name, confusingly, to the National Liberals, and ...”

“... with easy pleasures and made … playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before’. Citing John Aubrey’s image of a reclusive playwright who was never ‘a company keeper’, Shapiro insists that the business of biography is not to attempt to recover ‘Shakespeare in love’ but rather to discover ‘Shakespeare at work’. As its recasting of ...”

“... contemporaries) much more by what he said than by what he did. In the third and final volume of John Röhl’s immense biography of Wilhelm II, the Kaiser’s voice is the thread that holds the text together. On page after page, he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors (and the reader) with fantastical geopolitical ...”

“... of freelance life with Derek Stanford, a boyfriend and collaborator who became one of her major irritants, she turned out criticism that staged lively arguments in an idiom seemingly designed not to ruffle ageing bookmen: lots of ‘the diction is felicitous and pure’ and so on. Among her appealing period snapshots are notes on a visit to the poet ...”