“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”

“... what was going on on the street because she was a kind of conduit’.It isn’t surprising that it took time to catch on. It was, after all, reversing a trend that had endured for centuries: the centrifugal pull of extra muros towards a chlorophyll-enriched life, an escape, a reaction to the grime and pollution of the cities. ‘If the noxious particles that ...”

“... Her account supplements the existing European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to ...”

“... biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ...”

“... wandering for days before stumbling back to their settlements. Atherton was among them.Susan Howe took Atherton’s ordeal after the ‘Falls Fight’ as the focal point for her poem sequence ‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’, which was published as a chapbook in 1987 and later collected in Singularities (1990). It was his name that first caught her ...”

“... from the outset. Heaney’s ‘Follower’, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), took soundings from ‘As the team’s head-brass’: its tripping between ‘furrow’ and ‘narrowed’, ‘fell’ and ‘follow’ nods to Thomas’s strewn doublings (‘fallen’, ‘fallow’, ‘narrowing’, ‘yellow’), and its closing reversal ...”

“... a great deal of unostentatious heroism.’ It was here that plans for putting Ruskin into practice took shape: a school and workshop where the teachers would work in the shop and recruit the pupils to it. The School and Guild of Handicraft was opened in 1888 in a rented workshop in Commercial Street. The moment was opportune. Philanthropically, because money ...”

“... somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated’. She was the first-born child of the Boston mayor, John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a ‘paunchy welterweight’ as Nasaw calls him, who belted out ‘Sweet Adeline’ at every campaign gathering and kept his daughter on a short leash. Rose returned home from convent school in 1910 to become her ...”

“... knew his online life would be the one to read when it came to the puzzle of why he killed. But he took the extra precaution of printing out his manifesto and taking it with him to the college. He made the students gather in the middle of the room, chose one of them – ‘the lucky one’, he called him – and gave him a package containing the manifesto and ...”

“... market, driven by fantastic new technologies such as radio and aviation, rose steadily and then took off into the stratosphere. RCA stock went from $85 in 1928 to $549 in September 1929. Then, of course, it all collapsed. The stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression, but the two became inextricably linked in the popular imagination. Fraser ...”

“... he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply hungover from a Tuesday night at the ...”

“... favourite subjects, and he had a lifelong fascination with a statue in the British Museum that he took to be Mercury asleep (it is actually Endymion) and which he thought of as ‘the sure test of our imaginative faculty’. ‘Bend over it,’ he instructed a correspondent in hushed wonder. ‘Look at those delicate eyelids; that mouth a little open. He is ...”

“... was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word speech that took her two years to write and which forms the centrepiece of her bestselling novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). It was later elaborated in speeches, lectures and interviews, in the six non-fiction books Rand published in her lifetime, and a further dozen-odd ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”