“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... to the flinty Wyeth’s credit, this overture was rebuffed.’ Nearer home, there was the case of David Sylvester, perhaps the leading British art critic of the second half of the 20th century. Hughes valued him as a friend and a fine analyst; he was also the best exhibition installer of his time. But he was a very slow writer with ‘an indurated ...”

“... 25,000 British and Egyptian troops assembled with their modern guns and ten Nile gunboats. By no means everything went smoothly, in particular when the 21st Lancers were ambushed during a cavalry charge. Even so, Ronald Meiklejohn reflected that his troops ‘had taken part in one of the most spectacular – and perhaps “safest” – battles ever ...”

“... gifted and respectable unfortunate with his endowment of strong and fine feelings, and the by no means apocryphal coiner, connoisseur and acter-out of lines like ‘Syne coup her o’er amang the creels.’ There are poems in which the opposing conducts are in some sense reconciled, and the epistolary mode may be thought to have encouraged a convergence: but ...”

“... I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later tiles round the altar are more faded and pleasing than the harsh reds and blues of ancient glass in the ...”

“... known as Agenda 2010, that was introduced between 2003 and 2005. Its most notorious element is the means-tested basic welfare system known as Hartz IV, which four million German households rely on. The party that masterminded the changes and forced them through against popular protest was the SPD. Fifteen years later it is still struggling to come to terms ...”

“... a crime, a jewellery heist, he has just read about in the newspaper. He doesn’t know what this means, but thinks he should tell the police.He doesn’t make it to the police station, and the scene of his death is a much cited moment in film history; Lang himself copied it in his late work The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). The man’s car stops at a ...”

“... from legal ownership as a transitional step towards socialism. In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means estimated that ‘perhaps two-thirds of the industrial wealth’ of the US was in the hands of large corporations controlled by their managers rather than their owners. This paved the way, they argued, for what we would now call a ‘stakeholder’ form of ...”

“... the impossible, an enigma forever eluding our grasp, one who communicates by hitherto unknown means: Is there an unwritable unknown poem that exceeds anything the technique of writing can do? We will never know. Maybe this is her triumph. She has taken her secret to the grave and will not give up the ghost. To arrive as if by telepathic electricity and ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”

“... but that she wasn’t influential enough. Her marginalisation in the course of the Cold War means she has no successor today: there is no one able to use anthropology as the basis for mass appeals to the public. The post-Vietnam generation never forgave Mead for co-operating with the government; it refused to recognise that she was trying to change ...”

“... shows in his indispensable guide to the politics of American security after 9/11, these are by no means merely ancient or academic formulations. While liberal critics claim that the Bush administration lied about or deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify going to war, the fact is that the administration and its allies were often ...”

“... a therapy, it helps to distinguish the real you from the specious ones. And, of course, it’s by means of this distinction that you’re able to identify the good songs you wrote and the not-so-good songs, which is how you elect a song like ‘Strawberry Fields’ to the canon. It is by you and about you and about what you felt. What it has in common with ...”

“... trying to tell us what he thinks of us, to show his scorn for humanity, and he uses elephants as a means of expression, that’s all.’ Or perhaps elephants are ‘a mere political diversion’, a front for stirring up troubles like Britain’s in Kenya and France’s in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of ...”

“... teaching Marlowe and Austen in the day job and then also having a role in radical politics: it means treating one’s teaching and writing about Marlowe and Austen as a form of radical politics in itself. Guillory is severe on this particular form of professional self-delusion.These various forms of exaggeration are, fundamentally, expressions of a lack of ...”