“... thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the phrase, used by Roosevelt in his inaugural address, may have been adapted from Thoreau but the sentiment was authentically his own. Roosevelt’s personal courage and confidence was undoubtedly a major ingredient in the political recovery that followed. His regular informal press conferences and ‘fireside ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public acclaim, published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. According to Valerie Eliot, it was Pound ...”

“... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...”

“... the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of preparation,’ May’s deputy, Damian Green, told Tim ...”

“... trays of cucumber sandwiches and tea served in silver and china. The likes of Emmet and Pearse may no longer be executed for her sake, but in an Ireland which is still conservative in the role it allots to women, ‘chits of girls’ and ‘hussies’ must wait on her hand and foot, and only get grumbles for thanks. In a hard-pressed and resentful ...”

“... other iterations of palm oil, palm biofuel started off promising to be a virtuous substitute but may end up being as damaging as the thing it has replaced. When people started talking about ‘peak oil’ in the 1990s, many countries invested heavily in palm-oil-based agrofuels in the belief that they would be a carbon neutral or even carbon sequestering ...”

“... her most interesting appearances are in the generous quotations from an unpublished journal by Robert Pinget, one of the few Beckett disciples to whom she took a liking. On 6 August 1960, he pays a visit to hand back to Sam the ms. [of Comment c’est] he’d given me three days before to read. I was dreading having to give my opinion. The text is so ...”

“... and out. The unions’ hold over the British workplace from the 1940s to the 1970s, the historian Robert Taylor concluded in 1994, was ‘always more illusory and less substantial than their many enemies liked to suggest’. The same goes for union militancy in general. The graph of working days lost annually in Britain to strikes and other labour disputes is ...”

“... laid to rest. This was the great insight of another of Durkheim’s students, Robert Hertz: the funeral is a ritual not so much of transition as of separation – ending the earthly existence of the corpse. Proper burial and a proper naming of the dead allows them to go in peace, to be forgotten in Nietzsche’s sense that memory depends ...”

“... colleague of de Gaulle’s and a member of the interwar Radical party – to the Panthéon in 1987 may have pleased a broad political spectrum, but hard and less appealing choices followed. In 1989, Marie Curie was rejected as a bicentennial transfer in favour of three Revolutionaries who supposedly represented civil liberty because President Mitterrand did ...”

“... that the commercially-orientated research done by universities, and encouraged by government, may not after all produce any net benefit to the economy: it just drives out research that would have been conducted anyway, and perhaps more efficiently, by the private sector. The more unambiguous benefit of identifying the public research university with its ...”

“... judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”