“... and yet his total incapacity for decent conduct’. The fellow was clearly a cad: in a telling mark of Edwardian social ostracism, he had to resign from his club. Although we like to congratulate ourselves on having more relaxed views about sex than our Edwardian predecessors, censoriousness can take many forms. The focus of 21st-century disapproval tends ...”

“... America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up in an environment in which winning was the thing that mattered. Second place, Joe constantly preached to his children, was for losers. Like many of those who have written about the Kennedy clan, Tye gives insufficient due to ...”

“... is that drives specialists in the genre to pursue certain titles down to the last distinguishing mark on the cover. (If, for example, you own a first edition of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s The School at the Chalet with a bit torn off the dust-jacket, you will likely be prepared to pay the earth – up to £100, according to Joseph Connolly – for an intact ...”

“... Surrealist influence – his friendship with André Breton in the late Forties left an indelible mark on his poetry – is evident in the visionary intensity of the language. But despite its oneiric strangeness, the poem describes a purposeful quest for a fullness of being which time routinely denies the poet except for intermittent epiphanies granted him in ...”

“... is commissioned to write an article for a Sydney editor. He tells her his paper’s circulation rose when he ran a supplement on male homosexuality: ‘This is the second gay capital of the world after San Francisco... It started as a prison, maybe they retained the habit.’ Lillian likes the pock marks on his bluish jowls, and tries to ‘gain the erotic ...”

“... will do well to remember the fate of their ancestors. Stubbsian and Namierite interpretations rose because they accurately discerned certain aspects of the story; they fell because they turned these partial understandings into imaginary pictures of the whole. If today we want to know what Parliament did rather than was talked of as doing, if today we mean ...”

“... and the raising from the mud of the Thames, later that year, of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose. A common significance could be attached to both events: an ancient seafaring people, Churchill’s island race, were recovering some long-buried aspect of their identity. Wright is a brilliant analyst of cultural meanings and has uncovered, with much ...”

“... across languages is the central concern. Yet linguistic difference and difficulty leave no mark on Marani’s style. In The Last of the Vostyachs, Olga Pavlovna is Russian and Jaarmo Aurtova is Finnish. When she sends him a letter, and when they flirt, it might all be happening in Finnish, or in Russian, or even in English used as a lingua franca: no ...”

“... and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that had never merited inclusion? We get an idea of what he thought he was doing from his description of the 1933 Supplement as a ‘riffraff ...”

“... Operating Officer (she runs the business side). Top in her year at Harvard Business School, she rose to Clinton’s White House, McKinsey, Google and finally Facebook before she noticed that most of her circle had fallen away. Lean In is the story of her political awakening and her pep talk both for the women who leaned back and the ones coming up behind ...”

“... physical traces: the scent of violets in the pantry; a pool of water by the window; a small round mark, like a cigarette burn, on the carpet. Others offer protection or bring gifts. In ‘Patricia Lake’, a friend describes a visitation from his long-dead mother, who appears one night in his Upper East Side apartment: ‘It had a platform bed and she was ...”

“... buildings (Chichester Cathedral) and even businesses that wanted to make a dignified modern mark – the Time-Life building in Bond Street, for example. As time went by the pieces became larger: too large for the resemblance to natural forms still to function well. But they are now inoffensive – the eye glides peacefully over their bony lumps and ...”

“... in his little wooden hut. Some contemporary critics agree (at least I think they do): according to Mark Seltzer, quoted by Victoria Olwell, the ‘linking of hand, eye and letter in the act of writing by hand intimates the translation from mind to hand to eye and hence from the inward and invisible and spiritual to the outward and visible and ...”

“... Art dealers like the Wertheimers joined this composite elite. Dealing was a profession that rose dramatically in prestige precisely because the old families were losing money and new ones sought to acquire ‘the furniture of the great’. Prices were soaring. In 1882, Ferdinand de Rothschild instructed another Samson Wertheimer – a Jew from Fürth ...”

“... of the Venetian patriciate. According to him, the open book held by the winged lion of St Mark ‘is really a palimpsest’. ‘Beneath the official inscription, Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus, can be discerned the real and enduring slogan of the Venetian Republic, Dayla, dayla, or “Gimme, gimme!”.’ According to Queller, the difference between ...”