“... it … [Blair] cited a New Yorker essay full of barbed quotes about Hillary from [Sally] Quinn and Elizabeth Dole, the senator’s wife, plus a popular new novel about the 1992 election, Primary Colors. All she knew of that book, said Hillary, was that she cussed like a sailor and was portrayed in a graphic one-night stand with George Stephanopoulos, of all ...”

“... Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left had begun to wear thin. The LRB, which appeared to be moving leftward (in reality, Britain had moved to the right), stayed with him, and tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed ...”

“... in South Carolina, Florida and near Rio de Janeiro. English navigators were eager to join in, but Elizabeth I wasn’t much interested: since England was fighting Spain, as it was from 1585 till the end of her reign, it could pinch treasure from Spanish ships rather than scratching around in foreign lands looking for gold and pearls and dodging ...”

“... alternations of slapstick and salty dialogue. ‘Millionaires are funny’ was the lesson he drew from the experience. The millionaires in The Palm Beach Story are funny both in the sense that their customary exemption from everyday rough-and-tumble renders them particularly susceptible to humiliation by pratfall and in the sense that their vast wealth ...”

“... making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the pleasures of horror – we might, again shifting the terms, ask: what is the perverse profit of pleasure? How far is pleasure – the pleasure we take in celebrity, for example – bound up with ...”

“... to have tried to replace her (‘he looked for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be ...”

“... Unitarian sort of poem, it is nevertheless useful to be reminded by McCarthy that Barbauld drew at least as much on other religious and poetic traditions of the earlier 18th century, especially the philologist-philosopher James Harris and the poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons. Actually, it might be truer to say that Barbauld’s most remarkable ...”

“... philanthropists and reformers – Cavell is there, and so are Queens Victoria and Alexandra, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Angela Burdett-Coutts. St Joan’s International Alliance, a Catholic body that was founded by suffragettes and is recognised today by both the Vatican and the UN, celebrated its centenary in 2011, and still distinguishes itself by ...”

“... might be. Eventually, and only after some considerable effort, almost a cross-examination, we drew from three of our colleagues the admission that they wanted the UK to leave the European Convention as soon as possible – which extinguished any possibility of real consensus. What is the point of an agreement, we wondered, that joins those who see a Bill ...”

“... the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone. ‘Fascinating Fascism’ formed a double feature in Saturn with ‘Syberberg’s Hitler’, Sontag’s heavy-lifting explication of ...”

“... together until the age of three, at which point they were adopted into different families. She drew the Passmores – Frederick was an ‘auto-mechanic teacher’, and Mary was a ‘homemaker and former secretary’ whose own mother had died when she was born. They renamed their daughter Marian. ‘The Passmores didn’t like to talk about ...”

“... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...”

“... who had been billed to play the lead role of Julio but was too ill from jaundice to appear. What drew the crowds to Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work ...”

“... at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Hardy changed the last line from ‘Even to the original hat and gown’, which Tomalin calls ‘dull’, to the ‘original air-blue gown’, which ...”

“... his neck, kneeled in front of the young beauty this English soldier had brought back with him and drew the outline of her left foot and then her right on the paper he had asked her to stand on. She was 5’10”, very tall for an Italian, and had been nicknamed ‘the giraffe’ at home, where the much smaller local males found her height and thinness and ...”