“... them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but ...”

“... Carter’s ‘private opera house of the individual sensibility’. In an essay from 1911, Vernon Lee described the knack of seeing past the individual production: imprisoned in her seat, the spectator could allow her mind to ‘divagate from the music only to the stage; not the literal stage of indifferently painted lath and pasteboard, with its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...”

“... might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In many communities the arrival of twins was regarded as a queasy, unreadable omen. What to make of this mixed benison of one dead and one ...”

“... list, but although many of the Labour women MPs who preceded her had fought for equal pay, for child benefit to be paid to the mother, for pension rights for women and so on, they were often reluctant to be ‘cast in the feminist role’, as Barbara Castle put it. Class had always been the primary determinant of Labour Party policy: you improved the ...”

“... Keung put it, ‘It’s an invasion of the stomach.’ The conservative South Korean government of Lee Myung Bak formally abandoned the Sunshine Policy in 2010. Two years earlier, it had dropped its other central element, a jointly run holiday resort in the Diamond Mountains, after a North Korean soldier shot dead a middle-aged South Korean tourist who had ...”

“... stupid and offensive things which no amount of radical ingenuity can reclaim. He sympathised with Lee Oswald because he saw him as a solitary opponent of ‘American society’; he thought blacks in America had ‘a natural poetic sense’ which informed their politics; Stalin’s mass murders were for him mere figments of anti-Communists gossip; he admired ...”

“... to bring forth. With the other children she had her way. With Bernard, her third son and fourth child, she did not, or only at the price of repeated punishment, usually with the cane. ‘What have I done, what have I done?’ Bernard used to ask when he ran out into the Tasmanian bush to recover from his latest beating. But he knew. ‘Goodness, she was ...”

“... In terms of historical time, therefore, the happy ending of Gatty’s tale – the survival of the child, the recovery of Gatty after her apparent death and years of mental illness – seems to repair the tragedy of Sally, who dies along with her daughter, as if the divisions of North and South, Tory and Whig, Catholic and Protestant, which had been re-opened ...”

“... v. culture is where we have got to after debates in the West spanning millennia. Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapir’s ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from the ...”

“... to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.The beginning of my obsession coincided with the centenary of the Lumière Brothers’ first cinematograph projection, on the boulevard des Capucines in ...”

“... children’s prospects by paying for their education do I therefore object to parents sending a child to ballet classes. The Mail predictably labels me a hypocrite because I use both the NHS and private medicine, an admission I’d made myself on the radio, but with the Mail, as always, pretending it’s information it’s been clever enough to find ...”

“... young client had none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of the Swing ...”

“... enchantment that came completely naturally,’ Julia Costenla, an Argentine journalist told Jon Lee Anderson when he was researching his biography of Guevara. ‘If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.’That night he found a seat in a corner of the embassy gardens and everyone gathered round. I haven’t much memory of what was ...”