“... trip, Bezos flew ten miles higher on a rocket launched by his commercial space travel company, Blue Origin. Accompanying him was the teenage son of the head of a Dutch private equity fund, who paid millions for the seat.The other playground is deep under the ocean. Last year, Stockton Rush took his submersible Titan down to the wreck of the Titanic, more ...”

“... but he profited from the general relief at the death of his predecessor, the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of ...”

“... where she learned to choose the right word; we know about the forty-year marriage to John Gregory Dunne, who was ‘between me and the world’ – though it is surprising to hear her speak of how it happened, now, at 82: ‘Well I went to Hartford, and fell in love with his family, and determined that I was going to marry him. And did.’ Here her ...”

“... miser: with the encouragement of a catfish, he is vomiting gold coins. Three men wearing the blue leggings, jackets and cloth headbands of craftsmen and builders scramble for the fallen money. The catfish lectures the miser: ‘Sir, you suffer now because you oppressed those beneath you in ordinary times. It would be well for you to change your ways and ...”

“... bark. The Ferlinghetti beard seemed to get a little greyer in successive video clips. His ice-blue eyes shone out of a sea fret of put-upon benevolence. The tolerated witness, lurking in the background, is not part of the Six Gallery myth, but he is sharp enough to recognise, immediately, that Ginsberg’s apocalyptic regurgitated ‘Howl’ is the ...”

“... wants to be taken seriously, the same urge felt by the bestselling historical novelist Philippa Gregory, whose Women of the Cousins’ War (2011) is scholarly non-fiction, co-authored with two historians, exploring the lives of three late-medieval women featured in her novels. Both have PhDs – Gregory in English ...”

“... the creation of a voice, that of a bitter, troubled but smart 15-year-old Texan schoolboy, Vernon Gregory Little. Vernon narrates the book, and hurls his spiked words right at us. At his best, Pierre captures a pathetic combination of defensive cynicism and pain. Vernon hates his stupid, materialistic mother, who spends most of the novel waiting longingly for ...”

“... was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own psychiatrist ...”

“... and hot apple tea at Veselka, Alfred explained his screaming project. Kristen’s enormous pale blue eyes blinked at him like the wide-open beaks of baby birds as she listened. She was 24, still in the adventure phase of her move to New York City to work for a graphic design firm. Alfred was almost 29.’ The description of the meal, the eyes like the ...”

“... terms that resemble Yeats’s poems about Coole Park, the home of his patron and collaborator Lady Gregory: Great people lived and died in this house; Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, Captains and Governors, and long ago Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne. Some that had gone on Government work To London or to India came home to die, Or ...”

“... Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2006) examined the emergence of groups – readers of Gregory the Great, or the elites at Merovingian courts – who shared a particular view of the emotions, focusing on the language they used to express their emotional expectations and values.Rosenwein was reacting against the dominant paradigm for understanding ...”

“... much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology rather than to the weather or any particular living Americans. Of course people and even the weather, as Wilde ...”

“... In India, this figure was one god in a crowd of monkey gods and elephant-headed gods, blue men and women with four arms. Moreover, he existed only in abandoned temples and neglected statuary. Buddhism had vanished from India centuries before, and the native informants, the brahmans, merely knew the Buddha, if at all, from his later absorption into ...”

“... the juniper, the rudimentary dictionaries say, is an evergreen coniferous shrub or tree with hard blue berries, yielding an oil used in medicine as stimulant and diuretic. Add to that a discrimination of juniper-kinds, including the savin or Juniperius sabina, the genièvre, and the family of gymnosperm, not to speak of the Grimms’ tale of ‘The Juniper ...”

“... great names trip off the tongue: Jean-Noël Vuarnet, Sylviane Agacinski, Jim West, Mary McCarthy, Gregory Mazurovsky, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Louis and Zuka Mittelberg, Bruno Marcenac, Michel Loriod, Maurice Roche), he now can see that all the high-flown references he had barely understood – to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan – were no more than ...”