“... he found some wispy ‘not very reliable’ references suggesting that a dealer called Tawadros may have existed, and that he may have had a shop near Shepheard’s Hotel – previously the Hotel des Anglais, where spies and German generals used to gather. But there were no photographs or any other evidence of Tawadros ...”

“... are very few.It​ is all but sure that Sadiq Khan will be re-elected as London’s mayor on 6 May. This will not be an exciting election; the sole uncertainty is whether Khan will win in the first round or the second. Unexciting elections give political strategists sleepless nights. Will voters turn out when the outcome is already assured? Will the ...”

“... diatribe against Brussels, he told Cameron: ‘I think it will be a disaster if we leave. I may even have to relocate some of my businesses to be inside the EU.’ Cameron has some regrets about what happened next: It has been reported that I went on to ask him to sack Paul Dacre. Frankly, I wish I had – and I wish it had happened. I suspect he does ...”

“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... my head up high and say that now it is sorted’.The Infected Blood Inquiry, announced by Theresa May in 2017, began proceedings the following year. It has now heard oral evidence from more than two hundred people, with many thousands of pages of documents and written submissions, from family members as well as victims. Gary, Colin, Joe and Bob were all born ...”

“... and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who embodied conventionally masculine traits, at least in the ...”

“... spirituality’ in G.K.’s life. The Sins of G. K. Chesterton suggests that the second reason may have a bearing on the first. It wasn’t money, sex or power that tempted Chesterton, but misplaced loyalty. He took part in a number of nasty instances of journalistic intimidation, not just during the Marconi affair, all of them a result of trailing along ...”

“... and the sense of a yawning hole. I did not just feel ‘a leg’ was missing, as a button may be missing off one’s coat: I felt that part of me, of my person, was missing; and, in consequence, I felt radically diminished. It was only several years later that I came to read The Case of George Dedlow, an imaginary case-history of a physician who had ...”

“... Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the panelling or covered in ...”

“... seriously,’ claimed Dionysius in his essay ‘On Putting Words Together’. ‘Such men as these may think themselves possessed by the divine, but they are not inspired, just playing games,’ says the author of ‘On Height’. Citations come almost entirely from hostile critics and tell us little of the contents of Hegesias’ history. We know he explained ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will hold your hand but as long as all may –And ...”

“... his writing because his life was so full of confinement? His earliest surviving letter, written in May 1796 when he was 21, is addressed to an important friend and contains some surprising information: ‘Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol, – my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished ...”

“... sings with moral purpose like a Wesley hymn. And Browning goes on, almost as splendidly: ‘There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever.’ Browning’s prose expands ...”

“... the ones that penetrated the hull, were by intellectual formidables such as the critic and editor Richard Poirier, who methodically dismantled Bellow in this paper (after a patronising observation from Atlas about Bellow’s unsure footing when he ventures into ‘the realm of ideas’, Poirier dryly commented: ‘Atlas himself occasionally ventures into the ...”