“... Perot debates, but a lot lower than any before that). Joe Biden’s vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin in St Louis was watched by just under 70 million people, the second largest number of people ever to watch a televised debate. The result was a triumph of debate preparation on both sides. The Biden camp clearly remembered George Bush Sr’s 1984 ...”

“... in one of the Giardini’s most beautiful pavilions (designed by Sverre Fehn in 1962), is a hall of light and broken glass, where ethereal sounds are relayed by long angular speakers. The French have dug up three Scots pines and set them on slowly rotating platforms, one in the pavilion, two outside; they make an almost imperceptible waltz against the ...”

“... going to be like everybody else? (Brave 1980s attempts at normality failed, and brought us Sarah Ferguson, the commoner’s commoner.) So, Prince Charles, his whole life, has been accused of wastefulness, self-importance and fastidious idleness, and any book that claimed otherwise would be considered a letdown. The new biography by Catherine ...”

“... sense of certainty in the director Garry Hynes, just 29 at the time, as the company gets the hall ready for the evening performance. Perhaps she knows that the cruelty and naturalism of her production – complete with fleas and mucky, bare legs – will not be found insulting, that it will be recognised. The Druid Playboy was a return to the culture ...”

“... and state would still be flourishing three centuries hence. Only in feminist utopias, such as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), or in the post Revolutionary utopias of the 1790s, was Britain itself re-imagined philosophically. Looking back over the age of reason and the dawn of his own century, Engels saw utopian ...”

“... Have you ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse ...”

“... desk, was a more engaging and dramatic affair than the traditional podium-based and town-hall meeting style debates that preceded it. Not that it broke the pattern of the series as a whole. Although the final debate saw more disagreement on substance (and more detail about policy), the most memorable section dealt with the campaign itself. As ...”

“... to confess during this early phase of the witchhunt. Of her two co-defendants at the beginning, Sarah Good denied everything, Sarah Osborne accused Sarah Good. The self-owned witch Tituba has consequently become, in the ever-swelling literature about the horrors of Salem, the catalyst ...”

“... Sabbatai’s father and mother, Mordecai and Clara, with Joseph and Mary; his harlot-wife, Sarah, with Mary Magdalen; his homosexual lover and 12th apostle, Saul, with Judas; the Vizier and Sultan with Pilate. For the reader, the recurrent awareness of one story slumbering inside another curiously disturbs the temporal sense that should be shared with ...”

“... fall to his death. De Palma’s voice says: ‘I saw Vertigo in 1958. I saw it at Radio City Music Hall. I will never forget it.’ As he speaks the last sentence his image appears on screen. He is sitting in front of a fireplace, as he will be for the rest of the movie, but the camera gets closer to him later and stays closer. Here he is not smiling yet, but ...”

“... the moment when the narrator suggests that the ending of the Odyssey is no ending at all. As Edith Hall writes in The Return of Ulysses, Homer’s story has proved particularly attractive material for a postwar Europe trying to come to terms with the violence of its own history.1 Hans Erich Nossack is just one German writer who made the Odyssey his base for ...”

“... agitation, ‘Dead! dead! And never called me mother,’ which remained a popular gag with music-hall comedians well into the 20th century, belongs to a stage version, not the novel). After this cruel blow she falls into a decline, but refrains from revealing herself to her husband until she is at her last gasp: ‘Keep a little corner in your heart for your ...”

“... and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece. But Crabbe’s work, like that of the contemporary Austrian master Thomas Bernard, is still not widely read. In his own day Crabbe was a famous and distinguished author – the favourite of both Jane ...”

“... Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the ...”

“... follow suit over the next few years. Leading women’s schools in the US, including Vassar and Sarah Lawrence, meanwhile, began to admit men, as did Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s in Oxford, and Girton in Cambridge. In an extraordinarily short space of time, coeducation had ceased to be a distant possibility and was ...”