“... and builds them into masterful, all-embracing compositions. As his friend and admirer, the critic David Kalstone, once put it, Frivolity is always a form of invocation for JM, a preparation like the dancer’s at the barre. I have glimpsed him through the half-open study door, after a morning of work, playing a game of patience, waiting for it all to ...”

“... in the New York Observer, headed ‘Twilight of the Great Literary Beasts’, Sven Birkerts and David Foster Wallace lament the decline in quality of the work produced by America’s greatest living straight white male novelists, citing Bellow, Mailer, Roth and Updike. Neither mentions Kurt Vonnegut, even though Wallace goes so far as to call the trio of ...”

“... of which he had for many years been a generous benefactor), and suggested he instead see David Blumenthal, a cousin and one of the best cardiologists in New York. Blumenthal ran a series of tests, told Ben his heart would soon fail, and put him under the knife. The valve was replaced successfully. But there was a problem. A few weeks later, a stitch ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... back in chainsA little Lutheran for meAnd a Lutheran girl for my granny.Most of the soldiers were young. Of almost four hundred captured in England and later ransomed and repatriated, 48 had enlisted before they turned eighteen and most of the rest were under thirty.The senior officers were knights of Spain’s orders of chivalry. To qualify for ...”

“... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...”

“... Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in 1925 drank hard liquor out of teapots in speakeasies; or danced – danced, danced, danced! – often in a ...”

“... Sisi’s security apparatus merely refashions it to deflect blame. Shaimaa el-Sabbagh, a young mother and poet, was gunned down by police on 25 January 2014, the third anniversary of the start of the revolution; she had been walking unarmed through central Cairo clutching a bouquet of flowers, which she had intended to lay in Tahrir Square. The ...”

“... Commission for the loss of human property. What’s harder to measure, as the historian David Richardson noted, is the sheer ‘utility or pleasure’ Bristolians derived from the consumption of slave-produced sugar and snuff.As Hazel V. Carby writes in Imperial Intimacies, it was not just traders who profited from slavery. Residents working on the ...”

“... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...”

“... was to provide an opening for people who had developed their consensual ideas much earlier: for young socialist economists like Durbin, Gaitskell, Meade and Jay. Because of their group discussions Labour in 1945 ‘was intellectually prepared for the economic realities of power in a way inconceivable at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ...”

“... civility – attended by men and women anxious to ‘improve’ – rather than of vice. He begged David Garrick to cancel a revival of The Beggar’s Opera at Drury Lane on the grounds that it inflamed young men with the ambition to be highwaymen, and sent, ‘every time it is acted, one additional thief to the ...”

“... opposing elements – pacifists and fire-eaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. When they meet each other they generally make friends, and when they make friends they can find some of the solutions to their problems.’ In Nancy’s view, there could be no harm in inviting Ribbentrop for musical chairs, because there was no chance ...”

“... by her 12-year-old daughter) to be close to her son. When they met in 1917, Lewis was a young 18, she a handsome 45. They formed a close attachment whose exact character remains a matter of speculation, but the relationship, whatever it was, was only intensified by Paddy’s death in action in 1918. Mrs Moore began to take lodgings wherever Lewis ...”

“... friends, including the economist Piero Sraffa (who had known Henderson’s hero, Gramsci) and the young socialist historian E.P. Thompson, who shared his mistrust of the merely literary ‘culture boys’. He returned to Scotland, this time permanently, in the summer of 1946. Rebuffed by his father’s Glaswegian family, he embarked on a teacher training ...”