“... Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was proposed for membership of the French Academy, it was natural that some Frenchmen would make an issue of her nationality, in order to prevent a woman joining their ...”

“... at the official policy of allowing matters to take their course. ‘Machinery which renders labour more productive is not a good, but a mighty evil, if it diminish employment,’ Black wood’s argued. But it was, of course, the forces of popular radicalism, coming to a head in the Chartist movement, which voiced the keenest opposition. The alternative ...”

“... but at least one document (attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem) bundled all the Marys into one. More commonly, the Marys have combined and then divided, only to fuse again with other, unnamed women in Jesus’s circle. They seem particularly attracted to Mary Magdalene, to whom they cluster like pins to a dressmaker’s magnet. Over the centuries, the ...”

“... whose powers were then in decline. He was handsome, suave (his advice to reporters was ‘to be more debonair’), charismatic and completely unstable – an alcoholic who suffered from manic depression, which worsened as time went on. He became famous for transforming the more colourful episodes of his illness into ...”

“... societies and settings. Physical distance is helpful (the father of letter-writing), marriages (more than one), a hint of scandal or controversy, achievement and neglect, both in moderation (poverty is a great preservative, celebrity or laurels a terrible corrosive, too obvious or excessive greatness is dreary). A late flowering is ideal, but not ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... In a rather more judgmental time, history was sometimes written like this: ‘The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America ...”

“... Union survived the Civil War,’ he said, ‘the constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality.’ That new, more promising regime was Reconstruction, an array of reforms undertaken between 1863 and 1877 to refashion a fractured nation.In 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the ...”

“... Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a ...”

“... It’s been a better predictor than things like form, which you’d have thought would be much more useful. So, anyway, the entrails say that it will be one of the Big Four that wins – most likely Brazil, the only team to have won outside their own hemisphere, and whose players are much more used to European football ...”

“... to an Irish correspondent the consequences of bringing Catholics into the constitution: A much more marked division than there is at present between Catholics and heretics, and a much closer union among all classes of the latter. The Catholics, having nothing to lose, will speak out more plainly. Those of the Protestants ...”

“... changes of company, we shouldn’t have – as we do have – evidence of early copy in the Folio. More important is the simplicity of a notion of philistinism which can fail to see that if philistines created the longest and strongest and richest literary tradition in existence, there must be something interesting and complicated about some forms of ...”

“... vegetarian café called Karen’s. Playing truant from the library another afternoon, however, was more illuminating about the culture that bred Forrest and his muscular fan club. I went to a matinée of Julius Caesar, far more of a favourite in republican America than it has ever been in Britain, at the Belasco on West ...”

“... in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an hour around the perimeter fence of the newly laid, too green carpet of the sports complex, achieved in advance of the Great Event. An outwash of generosity, a compensatory gesture for those who must endure years of drilling, dust, demolished schools ...”

“... of times, and, after I’ve decided that this is what I want to eat, I don’t usually think any more about it. But today I’m writing about the history and current politics of what and how we eat, so I thought I’d look at the panel of Nutrition Facts that appears on the label of practically any packaged food you can now buy in America – something I ...”