“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... across from the Houses of Parliament, stretching the length of the Albert Embankment, is a wall of poppy-red hearts, placed there for Covid victims, as a tribute and an accusation. Nudged against Westminster Bridge, Chinese wedding couples, with brides in flowing white, are being arranged against their chosen London backdrop for a nuptial video.The ...”

“... barrier, that sacred and potent thing, profoundly respected inside banking, a ‘Chinese wall’. So nothing like this can ever happen! Except that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told Michael Lewis: ‘When I hear “Chinese ...”

“... revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara desert to keep out refugees.*Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Matthew Albence, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), repeats his earlier statement that the child migrant detention centres are like ...”

“... projects or an industrial policy to match those of China and Germany. Instead, it was Wall Street that profited in its role as the chief conduit of global finance – opening a third front in the class war.Clearly this system, if one can call it that, delivers significant benefits for some parties. The regime in China can claim the legitimacy that ...”

“... the duct, first acquiring the power to disrupt the arrangement of the cells that form the duct wall. It can then invade the surrounding tissue and infiltrate the lymphatic system (the network of capillaries and ducts that recycles blood plasma to the heart), finally colonising vital organs. One of the difficulties with breast cancer screening is that about ...”

“... his ennobled former chancellor, Lord Darling, was on his way to work for Morgan Stanley in Wall Street. Blair, an adviser to J.P. Morgan since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went ...”

“... as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall. Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... context is the ability to detect subtle changes of attitude on the other side, small cracks in the wall of Arab hostility surrounding Israel which might provide an opening for accommodation and peace. As Yehoshafat Harkabi, the outspokenly dovish former head of military intelligence, observed, ‘knowing your enemy’ must include the ability to know when the ...”

“... future: ‘Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates washed by machinery; not an aeroplane to vex us; all liberated; made whole.’ We are in a better position than Woolf and her first readers to mark the mixture of accuracy and mistake in that prophecy. In this new ‘real ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom ...”

“... he has to give. For Rossetti holds us in the same way we are held by the restless and brilliant Stephen Dedalus, who was – as he told Mr Deasy – a ‘learner’ rather than a teacher. To read or look at his work is to enter a demanding intellectual force-field. Unlike his greatly gifted but undemonstrative sister, Dante Gabriel’s work is driven by ...”

“... On the fourth floor of the original club at 40 Greek Street there was a button on the wall that one could press, late into the night, for another tray of whisky. Patrons bashed an old piano, and eccentrics came in every night, such as the wonderful Fay Presto, the queen of close-up magic. Fay was the magician at Langan’s Brasserie and she used ...”

“... remind us of Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead … In an earlier poem, ‘On Woman’, Yeats had associated the harshness of the desire between Solomon and Sheba with the explosive shudder of iron moved from fire and plunged into water. That is an ...”