“... well placed to understand. The flow of working people to the cities had always been matched by a small but steady trickle in the opposite direction of manufacturers made good seeking to clamber onto the lower-upper-class rung of society with the purchase of a country estate. Country houses continued to grow in number as the way of life that was needed to ...”

“... for Sianne Ngai, a critic and theorist with a habit, as she puts it, of hanging large coats on small pegs. Her field of research is the relation between aesthetics and ideology, viewed from a post-Marxist perspective, and she has already made two strikingly original contributions to that field. Ugly Feelings (2005) provides a sweeping yet fine-grained ...”

“... a family as much as with a person, just as E.M. Forster did with the family of Bob Buckingham and Helen Schlegel does with the Wilcoxes in Howards End, thinking she has found a way of life to love, or a lost tribe to which she might belong. Whatever the anxieties, a writer’s style will often enough be a homemade affair, a mesh of material discovered and ...”

“... in 1816, originally as a memorial to his wife Eliza. Above the brick burial vault and within a small precinct bounded by a heavy, classicising balustrade, he placed a tall canopy (almost three metres high) of rough Portland stone, supported on plain square columns and topped by one of his characteristic shallow domes. Inside this canopy was another – a ...”

“... refrain from quoting them to a bewildered congregation. I once sat through a long sermon on the small matter of the ‘lacrimae rerum’. While Bishop Herlihy was very worldly in an Italian way about many issues, his worldliness did not, I think, stretch to a priest under his control wishing to measure the length of twenty boys’ penises. He simply would ...”

“... external incentives seem more important than internal ones)’. To quote the actually peerless Helen DeWitt, who, when she couldn’t find a publisher for her difficult novel Your Name Here, sold PDFs of it through her website: ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!’That you can, as we say on the internet, just not occurs to Tolentino as a theoretical option but not an ...”

“... amount of pity or contempt for undergraduates as a tribe (‘They all looked the same. Like small, desperate creatures, fearful and alone in the world’) but their own position – shallowly rooted in the city, with deadlines looming for career breakthrough and/or personal fulfilment – is no more secure. This is a provisional landscape, and a group ...”

“... how much they looked like each other: the same penetrating, separated-at-birth expression, tight small mouths and grapey dark eyes.) Other famous Esther-admirers, and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness ...”

“... considerably complicated their task, and which Yallop darkly suggests was done because even a small quantity of blood ‘would have been sufficient for a forensic scientist to establish the presence of any poisonous substances’. Some of the Cardinals who had gathered in Rome now began to demand an autopsy – although by then the embalming fluid would ...”

“... traveller’. There were happy, outdoorsy times in upper Tweeddale, the birthplace of his mother, Helen. A cultured uncle introduced him to French novels and fly fishing, and gave him a 1621 edition of Tacitus. ‘I never went to school in the conventional sense,’ Buchan wrote, ‘for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family.’ But ...”

“... see these acres turn to silver and gold’; and ending with an account from 1906 of a visit from Helen Keller, who pleased Twain by agreeing that he was distinguished not only for his humour, but for his wisdom. Most of what appears in the Autobiography has been published before, but generally in fragments, or abridged, or reordered, or interspersed with ...”

“... 18 he was caught stealing money from his Owens College friends, in an attempt to support Marianne Helen (Nell) Harrison, a 17-year-old alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love. A month in prison was followed by a year in the United States, a stab at journalism, a return to England, a move to London, a reunion with Nell, and a decision to write ...”

“... to as ‘the Madiba magic’. In any event, there was plenty of opportunity for reflection in that small, dank prison cell, whose only window remained walled up for 16 years. A maximum security prisoner almost totally deprived of agency, Mandela never gave up the idea that he had sovereignty over his life, and the will to make it exceptional. Thanks to Clint ...”

“... to join ‘the chorus of mere whingers against Theory, all those mouthy conservatives from (say) Helen Gardner . . . to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new ...”

“... to America. At what was effectively the mid-point of his life, he undertook his autobiography, a small book published in French as Chroniques de ma vie, whose precise authorship, like that of Stravinsky’s other prose works, has been disputed. Stravinsky’s St Petersburg friend Walter Nouvel seems to have done much of the writing, but Walsh shrewdly ...”