“... embourgeoisify the proletariat’, while for Giaime it’s a straight run from the mid-1950s to May 1968 with Bardot striking out ahead. But there must have been an intervening stage in which doubts about the triumph of national reconstruction were appearing like cracks in a piece of commemorative porcelain, even as older anxieties about defeat and betrayal ...”

“... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...”

“... 150,000 people are enslaved in scamming compounds across Cambodia. In Myanmar the figure may be as high as 120,000; there are tens of thousands more in Laos and Thailand. They have been brought from the villages of Xinjiang, the slums of Manila and Nairobi, the secondary schools of the Czech Republic. Scamming is no less grotesque an example of ...”

“... of the United States. Saddam Hussein should have been there. (Hampered by travel restrictions, he may have sent flowers.) All the other godfathers had seen the King as expendable at one time or another. The Saudis subverted his regime and stole his family title, Custodian of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Netanyahu’s people proposed overthrowing him ...”

“... one type of beauty which he appreciated all too well. The bachelor don is today extinct. There may still be bachelors among the fellows of colleges, but the society in which they played such a distinctive role has vanished. The Royal Commission of 1882 had recommended that dons, like professors and heads of houses, should be free to marry, and amid lively ...”

“... the news failed, for essentially bureaucratic reasons, to reach the New Zealand Police. This may or may not be true. Either way, no doubt MI6 enjoyed the discomfiture of the French and the French, knowing they were being laughed at, hated it. As a consequence of the Greenpeace affair, the DGSE now has its fourth ...”

“... of his manner, including its open political bias and its embarrassing shortage of examples. What may be more significant, Peter Widdowson has for some years edited a journal called Literature and History, which publishes scholarly articles, more dispassionately written and usually more fully documented, on specialist topics such as the historical references ...”

“... argument, as there are, however, in recent alternatives to it. In his Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Richard Holmes decided that both Claire and Elise had been pregnant by Shelley, that Claire’s pregnancy had aborted, and Elena was Elise’s baby. Claire Tomalin, in Shelley and His World (1980) argued more reasonably that the child was Claire’s; and in a ...”

“... Hercules dropping the pine-tree he’s just uprooted when he’s told that Hylas is gone – magic may lend grandeur to realism, but fantasy gains nothing from being made too real. On the other hand, the scenes on Olympus work well: Athena and Hera pay a visit to Aphrodite to ask her to make Medea fall in love. She is sitting on her verandah; she calls them in ...”

“... about booming and book wars. ‘So,’ Ford remarks, ‘if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.’ He never did keep himself out of the picture, of course, and never meant to. The autobiography in Return to Yesterday often amounts to little more than local colour. Ford ...”

“... Mac against a US standard. Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and the McDonald’s brand, or the more specific brand of the Big Mac, is worth a lot. Note, however, that the ...”

“... The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes ...”

“... wealth, easy success, unproblematic seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s ...”

“... business interests. Black senior died in 1976 by falling over the banisters at his home; he may have committed suicide – in any case, Conrad saw it happen. ‘Life is hell,’ the father told the son while they waited for medical attention. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ He died later that night. It’s no surprise to ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”