“... Flaubert claimed to his friend Louis de Cormenin that he had translated Candide into English.) In May 1857, Flaubert wrote to Michel Lévy, the Parisian publisher of Madame Bovary, that ‘an English translation which fully satisfies me is being made under my eyes. If one is going to appear in England, I want it to be this one and not any other one.’ Five ...”

“... while assaulting the wandering eye and disrupting the balance of the room. Harmony and balance may suggest tranquillity, yet the spatial character of the rococo interior is often vertiginously exciting, the ornament enticing as well as diverting. In one of the smaller rooms at Stupinigi is the soffitto a ghiacci e finte porcellane, a ceiling covered with ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... photograph, while Abstract Expressionism, or whatever its equivalent in ongoing American poetry may be, continues its fissiparous course. Is Lowell the victim of what he himself called ‘the bravado of perpetual revolution, breakthrough as the stereotype, with nothing preserved’? That, in a sense, would be a fit end for a king, remaining embalmed in the ...”

“... with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted candidates as ...”

“... students was told by management to take down the questions she raised on Facebook). Gagging orders may not even be necessary. Silence issues from different causes: from fear, insecurity, precarious social conditions and shame. It is the shame of the battered wife that allows her husband to count on her silence. I recognise, for example, the compunction in the ...”

“... displaying Rhodesian military regalia. For the wider American conservative movement, white power may have been a useful dog off the leash when it came to unofficially fighting far-flung communist insurgencies, but it has also been a liability. Faced with the reality of a multiracial America, the mainstream Republican Party has mostly been wary of making ...”

“... itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.’ University administrations boast of diversity, equity and inclusion, while behind the scenes they hold tightly to power, continuing to privilege the Eurocentric, settler colonial ...”

“... were to ask how he came by such detail, one possible answer is that he made it up. As this episode may suggest, the author of this book is the omniscient narrator personified, a participant-observer in every drama. Thus when the young Raymond, a lad of 11 or 12, rushes out onto the hills, Fred lumbers after him, noting the way the bracken bends and breaks ...”

“... cropping and composition – did not attract the criticism meted out to Sickert and others, but may have done as much to seed the lessons of modern art in Britain.These early influences are apparent in Sickert’s music-hall interiors of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Whistler is there in the control of low tones: the effects of artificial light in near ...”

“... as being ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’, something else which like the banana I had never seen.3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.After 7 October 2023, the Israeli government narrowed its ...”

“... motives. The loss of innocence feels to a Murdoch character like an injury for which he may reasonably demand a reparation not to be distinguished in its effects from revenge; his inability to bear his own guilt seems to require an act of self-restoration – or self-annihilation – that risks repeating his crimes. A character is cruel to others in ...”

“... in the volume’s 502 pages. Londonists responded in two ways to Shepard’s stonewalling. Richard O’Connor – who aimed to write the definitive biography – was denied access to the materials in the Huntington Library. But the estate could not keep him away from the public record and O’Connor’s Jack London (1964) began with an exhaustive ...”