“... skills offer them the same possibilities? According to Chesterton, ‘twenty million young women rose to their feet and said: “We will not be dictated to,” and immediately became shorthand typists.’ But they had also found a skill that afforded them a better wage than factory work, improved conditions, and, if they were so inclined, the opportunity to ...”

“... children. The Lancet of 6 March responded by publishing five statements; from its editor, Richard Horton, from three authors of the original paper (including Wakefield) and from the vice-dean and campus director of the Royal Free and University College Medical School. There was also a leader by Horton, ‘The Lessons of MMR’, and a ‘Retraction of ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ...”

“... had reached 130 million; between 1909 and 1929 the estimated revenue in the magazine market rose from 54 million dollars to 320 million dollars. Magazines in the 1920s were, as Woodhead puts it, ‘the most influential vehicle in creating dreams, establishing trends and swaying consumer opinion’ and the two women understood very well the need to ...”

“... the scholarly sarcasm that was perfected a century later by the great Cambridge classical scholar Richard Bentley. But it suggests that Chapman was less motivated by a desire to understand Homeric society in itself than to insist to his vernacular readers that he alone was the truest and best interpreter of Homer. Chapman got it wrong here, as he often ...”

“... his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of ...”

“... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...”

“... remember, during the debate over the Central African Federation in the Sixties, that Lord Hailsham rose to defend his friend Iain Macleod from the deadly charge of being ‘too clever by half’. That jeer, issued by Lord Salisbury, had been amplified in the Lords by the yahoo figure of Angus Graham, Duke of Montrose, later to be a member of Ian Smith’s ...”

“... the Party which had exiled and terrorised his people. He became an activist in the Komsomol, and rose to the Central Committee, that preparation ground for future leaders, qualifying for foreign travel and passing into the middle level of the nomenclatura. Switching from law to economics, he was accepted as a lecturer in the Plekhanov Institute of the ...”

“... not so made that ‘sweet effluvia darting through the brain’ could cause them to ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’, but the advance of civilisation was proving him naive. However, the main impulse in this modified smell discourse (as one might now be encouraged to put it) was towards the practice of deodorisation, both of the body and the city. As to ...”

“... names of the Marlowes’ neighbours as if he were doffing his cap to them in the street: Alderman Rose the woollen-draper; Harmon Verson the immigrant glazier; Laurence Applegate the tailor, who spoke ‘bawdy words’ about Mistress Hurt; Goodman Shaw the basketmaker, into whose house John Marlowe stormed one evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou ...”

“... 1962’, in which a girl taking off her clothes at a bus-stop is suffering from the ‘Gypsy Rose [Lee] virus’. Although Davis strings us along for a page, this bit is from a 1952 Robert Heinlein novella. One hundred million house mice did indeed overrun the Southern Californian town of Taft in 1926, and the picture of ‘Federal men killing ...”

“... it deserves. Not much is known about the Russian Jews who fought on the Boer side, though several rose to significant rank; we find a Commandant Kaplan and a Commandant Isaac Herman, while two others, Josef Segal (‘Jackals’) and Wolf Jacobson (‘Wolf’), who acted as scouts, were legendary figures in their time; Segal became a special adviser and secret ...”

“... the Goya portrait of Wellington, is a divorcee, and has a rather well-known collection of famille rose dishes. (Such things count for a lot in Brookner’s novels.) A lover of fine things, he proposes marriage to Edith. She accepts. But in a surprising climax things go wrong. This time, however, Edith takes charge of her own destiny, acting – at last ...”