“... favourite motif of early modern writing: the timbers of Renaissance imaginations creaked under the weight of analogy. The soul was a ship, and temptations would wreck it. The state was a ship, and poor governance would wreck it (William Johnson: ‘I think Monarchy is the best Government in a Ship, as well as in the State’). A good woman was ‘like a ...”

“... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...”

“... Ellison responded that he was giving his life to the novel. The burden he was bearing was the weight of an unfinished masterpiece, not the guilt of failing to produce political manifestos. But it turned out not to be so easy to separate the literary from the political vision. Between the politics he renounced and the fiction whose single triumph he could ...”

“... his publisher after delivering the manuscript, ‘to give the hotel-allegory side of it any more weight. It seems to me that a very little allegory goes a long way.’) And the emphasis on transience is as much absurdist or existentialist as political. ‘People are insubstantial,’ an elderly doctor mutters continually; ‘they never last.’ At one point ...”

“... loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.Antoinette as a royal consort was a ...”

“... were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven underground by the shocking ...”

“... on a pair of scales, and, taking out a gold pencil from his dressing-gown pocket, wrote down his weight in fine German numerals, on a pad which was attached to a metal ashtray. Three years earlier my brother had been born in the same nursing home. He had been breast-fed for a little while. In my case my mother decided not to make the attempt. My birth was in ...”

“... work. At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day. Always prone to losing weight, she reassured Aurelia by listing everything she ate (‘Two bowls of noodle soup, one slice of bread, two helpings of potatoes and cabbage’), updated her on her activities (‘How I love metal work!’), sent poems she’d written for the camp newspaper ...”

“... onto treatment whether the patient needs it or not, and people may die under the impressive weight of medical science even while everyone’s conscience remains absolutely clear. Professional codes of this kind come into existence, the authors suggest, because of an insecurity we all feel about coping with uncertainty. Much of ethics (like much of the ...”

“... particularly likeable. The Fermata is full of jocular euphemisms. Arno’s penis is his ‘richard’, his ‘Juiceman’, his ‘stain-stick’, his ‘gender-beam’, his ‘bloated factotum’. Considering it in conjunction with the relevant testicles yields ‘moist troika’ and ‘trilogy-in-flesh’. Semen is ‘pecker-paste’ or ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... of international security to which any regime, whatever its complexion, would have had to give weight. The affairs of Catholic France and Spain tend to figure only when those countries directly involve themselves in Dutch developments. It is a pity, too, that Pincus passes silently over the tense Anglo-Dutch relations of the years 1654-60 and the struggles ...”

“... depressed fellow prisoners, organising sports and other activities, even though he lost 90 lbs in weight. Returning to Russia, he showed similar courage in the face of the Bolsheviks, whom he detested, and ended his days selling cigarettes in Tbilisi marketplace, still dressed in princely garments. Some Russian aristocrats who came to fight were men of the ...”

“... on the whole batch. From this point on, Orwell’s satirical sketch begins to crumble beneath the weight of its own laborious hyperbole. ‘Do I seem to exaggerate?’ he asks and then he does one of his characteristic ‘Ask anyone’ corroborations. ‘Ask any regular reviewer ... whether he can deny in honesty that his habits and character are such as I ...”

“... years of steam and filth, a pioneering American emerged ‘with a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing and . . . a firm determination to encounter ten jams on Ludgate Hill rather than make another trip on the Underground railway of London’. Like mining accidents, the intermittent catastrophes on the Underground ...”