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“... this pre-emptive embrace of male pornography is, she thinks, an alarming way of asserting female power. Their behaviour is determined by the men they think they are free from. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante has cut the shocked reaction and eradicated all ambivalence – there are no multiple perspectives, no daughters imagining fathers imagining wives ...”

“... to Labour? Or in those seats with a high-minded middle class? Perhaps Oona King, Barbara Roche and Anne Campbell could ask him. (Indeed Oona King could ask herself what she thought was going to happen.) The prime minister’s self-indulgence should not be rewarded by another long spell in Downing Street. That is not the only thing to be said against his ...”

“... other sources – that British secret policemen did place themselves at the service of a foreign power in the attempt to destabilise an elected British government. Mr James Angleton may not have been – was not, in my opinion – as foul as the men of Dzerzhinsky Square. But the point of protesting about ‘moral equivalence’ is surely not to blur moral ...”

“... were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty ...”

“... a data mafia who swoop on opponents in fake taxis, trimming off their crania with the buzz of a power saw. Our hero begins his Alice-like plunge into wonderland through an ordinary-seeming closet in a downtown skyscraper, which opens to reveal a waterfall and the laboratory of the world’s greatest neurophysiologist, the Professor. Laundering the ...”

“... a place for themselves in the world of employment that allowed them independence and a degree of power? Learning shorthand and typing was once a way for a young man to have an exciting career as a journalist, or, like Dickens and his shadow David Copperfield, to become a parliamentary reporter. When the First World War and the economics of differential wages ...”

“... necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the law had to be (more or less) accepted by the man in the street – anyone likely to be robbed or mugged and any potential juryman. After all, nobodies as well as nobs had their stuff ...”

“... half a dozen essays a year to Blackwood’s Magazine, delivering on Bunsen, Savonarola, Queen Anne, Marco Polo and Jesus Christ. Her fluency brought her compliments on her ‘industry’ in which she detected ‘a delightful superiority’: she was a connoisseur of condescensions. It also brought her undisguised insults. Stung by Mrs Oliphant’s review ...”

“... Benandanti in 1964, and has now been skilfully, even elegantly translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi. Night Battles follows the fortunes of the benandanti through a series of Inquisition trials from 1575, when they first appear in the records, until 1676, when both they and the witches had ceased to be of much interest to the Church authorities. In ...”

“... and friars emerge from hiding places to resolve each plot’, he seems to be talking about Anne Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis rather than Shakespeare, and readers of Bishop’s study may be similarly surprised to learn that ‘the figure of the Virgin Mother’ is ‘Shakespeare’s deepest presider over the scene of reunion’. It would be a ...”

“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William ...”

“... William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos were among the last hurrahs of the postwar literary era dominated by ...”

“... be cancelled who knows when ... ?”, if we cannot radically alter our relationships with public power; but neither a transformed nor a reformed public realm will be worth having if individual creative values do not flourish, indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often ...”

“... myths for what they revealed about the human psyche, he was experiencing the speculative, oracular power of these materials. His view still holds very widely. While myths might be narrative fossils from unimaginably long ago – astonishingly, there is only one mention of anyone reading or writing anything in Homer – they offer themselves to us as rich ...”

“... Queen Margrethe II of Denmark is one great-great-granddaughter, and the former Queen Anne-Marie of Greece is another. To describe him as well connected would be something of an understatement. But none of this helps in explaining who Prince Arthur actually was, what he accomplished, or why – if at all – he still matters. From his birth in ...”