“... each slot goes on behind the scenes to determine which ad you will be shown. Your phone or laptop may itself be gathering bids for the auction. Sometimes, an enigmatic pattern or grey rectangle will appear instead of an ad.What goes on during those few seconds is vital to the economics of journalism and is the subject of sharp, subterranean conflict among ...”

“... even when they get things right, giving attentive accounts with the salient facts in order, they may leave out friendships and discoveries that contributed greatly to a writer’s inner life. How to supplement – or correct, or displace – a future biography without taking years to concentrate on a memoir? Seamus Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll have found a ...”

“... And, metaphor apart, a domino-effect is at work in the narrative. ‘If I have robbed you, may I be turned into a leper!’ says an old servant, dismissed for theft. Years later he returns for forgiveness, stricken with leprosy (all curses and prophecies come true in this book): mistaken for the ghost of another character, he provokes frightened ...”

“... face was presumably missing, they must be rather proud of their technology. The Navy Seals may have been using gear similar to the Robocop-style glasses the Brazilian police have developed in preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Fitted with a small camera that sees as far as 12 miles, the glasses can capture 400 images a second and compare them with a ...”

“... If we don’t do this​ , we may not have an economy on Monday,’ the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said on 18 September 2008 when he demanded action from Congress to assist the banking system. Ten years later we do still have an economy. But it is worth asking whether the panic back then foreclosed other ways forward ...”

“... Sometimes​ you just have to think of England. It may be embarrassing, it may be awful, but it exists. Max Porter’s Lanny – his second novel – is partly about an idea of England. It’s set in an unnamed village, ‘fewer than fifty redbrick cottages’, within commuting distance of London, a place that is ‘a cruciform grid with the twin hearts of church and pub in the middle ...”

“... the great postmodern meganovels by Pynchon or Perec, Bolaño or García Márquez; and it may be said to rival even New Athens itself, of which the equally historical poet Elżbieta Drużbacka says: ‘This volume is so strangely magical that an endless reading is permitted in which one picks and pecks here and there, always finding interesting ...”

“... the encircling seas;And calls to causes else forlorn,      The children at your knees:May their brave hearts in days to come      Dream unashamed of these!While this is not exactly a call to take up the white man’s burden, the adjective ‘unashamed’ does push back firmly against incipient imperial guilt and the rhetoric of ...”

“... of the older century to the anti-Jewish laws of the next seems pretty straight and we may remember that Madeleine Lévy, the granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus, died in Auschwitz. Pétain himself, we learn in Proust among the Nations, personally intervened to make the provisions of the Statut des Juifs harsher. Rose also tells us that as late as ...”

“... it follows that the reasons for killing someone aren’t fixed for all time. Sexual secrets may lose their explosive force, and even jealousy may weaken as a motive for snuffing out a life. Detective fiction tends to be regarded as naturally right-wing, which may partly be a result ...”

“... reason himself into an atheist.’ (That the latter process was by no means incomprehensible may be too modern an idea; it is unlikely that Mansfield was advancing a coded defence of Jacobitism.) But although the bare accusation was capable, particularly after the ’45 and Culloden, of destroying a career, in Mansfield’s youth, Poser points out, both ...”

“... drive on the Belorussian Front in 1944; taking Berlin and accepting the German surrender in May 1945. Zhukov was the man on the white horse who led the victory parade in Red Square. Such a popular and charismatic figure was not going to get by without having problems. Both in Stalin’s time and in Khrushchev’s, there were periods of demotion and ...”

“... should legitimate neither gay unions nor ‘man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be’.) Meanwhile, one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America, Reverend Ted Haggard of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was caught up in a sex scandal. Haggard was a trusted adviser to the president on social issues and had drawn plenty ...”

“... regard were diametrically opposite. Still, he got there first by some thirty years. And things may be different at Harvard. Those who know Pipes only as a hardliner during the Cold War heyday of the Reagan years may doubt his credentials as an iconoclast. But what else is one to call someone who invokes Lytton Strachey ...”

“... propose a man’s health on his 359th [it was actually the 361st] birthday,’ Shaw said, ‘you may be sure that … what his health requires is country air … But Stratford wants a new theatre. The Memorial is an admirable building, adapted for every conceivable purpose – except that of a theatre.’ Shaw’s fellow governors felt it necessary to make ...”