“... of a sensitive exit and a pretty corpse. Those who want a gust of emotion will usually go to a Richard Curtis film, or read one of Goodwin’s suggested poems for people feeling out-of-sorts. And if they rent Four Weddings and a Funeral they can have both at once, without having to leave their own heads, however briefly. ‘Accessibility’ is the ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... were four distinct marks in the carpet, indentations where the chair that took their combined weight had stood. A detail noticed, with affectionate forensic eye, in the bedroom of the house in which Ronald Walter Kötting died in 2000. Father’s heart was bad, he spent time in hospital – and then, with no hope of recovery, he came home to wait. Andrew ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is not enough. Governments must restore house building to something like postwar levels. When Richard Crossman was housing minister in the 1960s, some 400,000 houses were built every year, most of them council houses. In the last few years the number has scarcely exceeded 150,000. This year it is unlikely to reach half that level, and little of it will be ...”

“... her alone. Take for a final example the renowned physician, collector and charitable benefactor Richard Mead. When Pilkington first approached him for assistance – she was a distant relation of the Irish branch of the Mead family and was going by the name ‘Mrs Meade’ at the time – he humiliated her, deflating her literary aspirations and dispensing ...”

“... have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”’ She dramatised the South-West breakthrough in her 1915 novel, Song of the Lark, a book that shed light ...”

“... state’ has been extensively studied from a variety of angles, most recently in Richard Overy’s The Bombing War: Europe 1939-45, which includes an authoritative account of the evolution into doctrine of the belief that strategic bombing defined the purpose of the modern air force as an instrument capable of transforming warfare. Overy ...”

“... larger Cold War game. In response to Barzani’s plea, he instructed the US ambassador in Tehran, Richard Helms, to convey his sympathies: We appreciate the deep concern which prompted … Barzani’s message to Secretary Kissinger. We can understand that the difficult decisions which the Kurdish people now face are a cause of deep anguish for them. We have ...”

“... the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the Mountain, those radical deputies who sat ...”