“... that they don’t have. It hangs about the house though; the teapot, unused, sits in the china cabinet, looking silly, but my mother keeps hair grips in the doll’s cottage that is meant to be a sugar basin. Years pass. A dozen sets of crockery are smashed, but the cottage survives. Its tiny windowpanes accrete a rim of grime. And grimly, night after ...”

“... I remember the words vividly as she said: ‘He is the love of her life.’ Always, there was the shadow of what they had been doing in Germany. In Black List, Section H, the narrator went to Germany not because he admired Hitler or the Nazis, but because he sought his own crucifixion there, sought to be where there was darkness and destruction. If the book ...”

“... Gray, he also notes that Russell was opposed to evictions on this scale, but that members of his cabinet, who had interests in Ireland, prevented legislation offering tenants greater rights. No one doubted that an eviction order was close to a death sentence, especially in the second half of the 1840s. In Kilrush, Co. Clare, in 18 months between 1847 and ...”

“... on what support could the PT count? The trade unions, if somewhat more active under Dilma, were a shadow of their combative past. The poor remained passive beneficiaries of PT rule, which had never educated or organised them, let alone mobilised them as a collective force. Social movements – of the landless, or the homeless – had been kept at a ...”

“... old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite facts and obscure references, to coax a shadow universe into pure existence. It was obviously written by someone who had read Borges. By 1971, however, Borges was clearly not himself. In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote: I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I ...”

“... European Act of 1987, it was rarely exercised, consensus typically being reached ‘not in the shadow of the veto, but in the shadow of the vote’. Should a member state resist a majority decision, it cannot be enforced, short of foreign occupation, but pressure can be put on it to conform by ‘other means’. The ...”

“... As time went on, this expansionist ideology began to lose its appeal. Even so it cast a long shadow over the Sahrawis’ aspirations and the fate of any Moroccan activist, like Serfaty, who spoke up in their favour. He was one of a very small minority: more than half a century later, the Palestinian cause can bring thousands of Moroccans out on the ...”

“... I think I had an earlier glimpse of Margaret, an equivocal figure, moving around in the shadow of Eliza, part hardy working-class, part subtle and precarious, as the young Julie Andrews must have seemed in the part. I couldn’t have said any of it this way at the time, and the class fable – or is it a fable about essential human ...”

“... a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there were five rooms. A large bow-windowed bedroom at the front with a huge feather-bed belonged ...”

“... of his most celebrated creation, Widmerpool, on the colonel who hired and fired him in the wartime Cabinet Office, Denis Capel-Dunn, an ‘undistinguished’ lawyer in civil life who perished on a flight back from the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco, to no great distress on Powell’s part. With the completion of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the ...”

“... I see a penumbra of California Syrup of Figs across the cheeks in Giotto, or wherever the shadow of Byzantium falls across Italian painting. My father’s work, as I can now see in retrospect, changed to a considerable degree over the years of my childhood, and this certainly influenced the background against which I grew up. When I was very young, or ...”