“... Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed her to the Lords and made her an education minister.At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred ...”

“... must have then felt like her oversize presence in literary life. From her late teens she made a home of the Mandrake Club and Caves de France in Soho; she argued at the soirées held by the literary journalist and Romanian émigré Miron Grindea. In every interview – there were several – she bemoaned the ‘dry’, ‘academic’ consciousness of her ...”

“... Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the start of the war might have fetched him home still on the same tack, 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to ...”

“... in his Life of Charlemagne written between 814 and 817, who ‘took care of everything, either at home or abroad, that needed to be done and arranged for the administration of the kingdom’. Kings should be able to wield power effectively. The chronicler Regino of Prüm, writing between 900 and 908, commented on the crisis after the Emperor Charles the ...”

“... of madness on this side of the Channel remained ad hoc and un-systematic, with most madmen kept at home or left to roam the countryside, while that small fraction who were confined could generally be found in the small ‘madhouses’ which made up the newly-emerging private ‘trade in lunacy’. There was no English ‘exorcism’ of madness; no serious ...”

“... one day, perhaps, you will notice that the house you are defending is empty and nobody has been at home for years. Meanwhile you are here in the half-dark with the patriote isolé. ‘Millions of French people were brought up in the worship of Robespierre,’ says François Crouzet in an essay here. How is it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of ...”

“... coherence’, then suddenly cut, so that ‘they rolled to all the corners of the room.’ ‘Good Lord,’ she prayed, ‘give me a personality.’ One of the most extraordinary things about the Benson family is that Minnie too had seen Edward White Benson through a child’s eyes: they had become engaged when she was 12. After his death she began to reassess ...”

“... is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them. A lot has been made of her ability to function on four hours’ sleep a night. Moore indicates that this is something of a myth. No, she didn’t sleep much, but often this made her tetchy ...”

“... city are more likely to be found notorious in the country.We made a trip into Glasgow to a care home on the Crow Road, where Edwin Morgan was then living and writing. He and I had corresponded when he left his old flat and lost his library. I sent him some books and we agreed to see each other in Glasgow. Eddie was a city man. He was a city poet. It must ...”

“... they’d taken the island from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, found there was only one local lord left to deal with. King Vikrama Rajasinha believed he could hold the city of Kandy, which is situated in the jungle of the central highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British ...”

“... for the Arts and was to play a part in the creation of a new breed of quasi-poor. But what Lord Eccles said chimed with what other people, including economists, were saying. And with this easy elimination of poverty from the mind, it seemed wilfully pessimistic to go grinding on about the have-nots in society – indeed, there was no need to do ...”

“... purview, and also bred people, British in outlook and adventurous by disposition, who felt at home almost anywhere in its world-wide expanse – except in class-riven, social-mountaineering Britain itself. Kipling was one; another was Eric Shipton, born in 1907 in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, son of a tea planter who died before Eric was three. His formidable ...”

“... low-rent Lucifer – and was humming quietly. You’d be so – o – o – o – nice – to come home to! He reminded me at once of those hunky young hard-drinking sailors, packed into fresh clean whites and reeking of Old Spice, whom my mother somewhat recklessly dated before she finally got together with Turk in 1967. When I wasn’t riding my skateboard ...”

“... or his saviour. Stephen does not realise it till quite late, not till after he has agreed to come home with Bloom. To feel himself generally doomed, while throwing away his only source of money, with nowhere to sleep that night, is of course only rational. Molly laid out the cards in bed that morning, after Bloom had brought her breakfast, and learned that ...”

“... he had read with his friends in the Iron Guard in the 1970s: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.”’The new pope was shown his palatial quarters by Georg Gänswein, Ratzinger’s personal secretary and prefect of the papal household. ‘As Gänswein fumbled with the light switch,’ Ivereigh writes, ‘Francis found himself peering ...”