“... he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death. Diaries, letters and lovers have been open to him. He is in an ideal position to evoke as well as analyse. What he has actually done is annotate and ...”

“... two decades running against the legacy of the three-term mayor, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Thomas Piketty’s unexpected blockbuster made talk of class conflict safe for polite company, while trend pieces heralded ‘the new socialist wunderkinds of America’ gathered around magazines like the New Inquiry (several of its editors were arrested during ...”

“... from their own individual experiences. Widespread anxiety produces phenomena unthinkable in more prosperous times: for example, Thomas Piketty’s seven hundred-page volume of economic theory, Capital in the 21st Century, joining the bestseller lists. During crises of capitalism in the 20th century, the equivalent ...”

“... now has a government educational scheme named after him, was not only obscure but disgraced for more than a quarter-century after his death. Hinton isn’t of Turing’s calibre, and Blacklock doesn’t oversell him as a pioneer, though he quotes encomia by Borges and Iain Sinclair. Hinton published an essay called ‘What Is the Fourth Dimension?’ a few ...”

“... to Hitch: in spite of his exhaustive and fascinating new research, Spoto is often unable to offer more than a jaundiced paraphrase of Taylor’s accounts (he mentions Hitch only once in the text and twice in the notes). When his versions of events differ from Taylor’s he usually looks on the dark side: in particular, the disgusted way he writes of the last ...”

“... as ‘the constitutional historian’, and this is a reminder that that is what he is, but even more he is the historian of the Tudor court, real politics rather than the constitution. No one is better qualified to tell the story of Elizabeth’s first 25 years, which are given cursory treatment in many earlier biographies. They were allowed only 45 pages ...”

“... own election that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way and that to ...”

“... under a frosty blue-black pressure. In this type of criticism, the reading process becomes more than analogous to the act of writing: reading fuses with writing because it empathises in a dramatic manner with the critic’s struggle to express ideas, a struggle that resembles an actor’s total expressiveness in relation to an audience. Such writing is ...”

“... By the end of summer, hope was lost: the Venetian ambassador wrote that Mary’s pregnancy was more likely to ‘end in wind rather than anything else’. Another source claimed that she had given birth to a monkey.Anthonis Mor’s portrait from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is ...”

“... wouldn’t a working girl like Sugar wear the ‘free trade’ variety? Sadleir would have been more knowledgable about Victorian knickers. In the critical afterword to The Quincunx, his 1989 attempt at a neo-Victorian novel, Charles Palliser says that the main ingredient of the recipe is ‘inversion’. Take Jane Eyre, turn it upside down, shake well and ...”

“... ignored, neglected, marginalised’ in France in spite of the Loi Taubira. The French transported more than 1.1 million Africans to the New World, about an eighth of the total traffic. The three French Caribbean colonies (Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue) took in as many slaves as all of Spanish America, and Martinique alone imported ...”

“... the video is interesting, or why it was shared around the world and viewed millions of times. The more I try to describe why it was compelling the worse it sounds. You had to be there.Patricia Lockwood is blunt about the difficulty of transposing the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals ...”

“... the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the ...”

“... owning slaves and investing in those who do.So Barclay’s record on slavery was mixed. He spent more than a decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only after he realised that anti-slavery ...”

“... That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout on Admiralty Road. On the way home from the pictures – the Rosyth Palace, maybe having seen there a naval epic such as The Cruel Sea or Above Us the Waves – I sometimes stood at the bus stop ...”