“... had been put away for the night.’ Over the centuries the miracle courtyards swelled with more honest indigents; they became known as cités – a word associated nowadays with public housing projects – but Sante’s coterie of ne’er-do-wells remained in charge. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo described a typical cité as a ‘monstrous ...”

“... and with Han’s full approval, enhanced by ‘occasional interpolations’ after she listened ‘more carefully to what it [the text] was telling me’. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are ‘the silent masters of culture’. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote ‘hidden masters of culture’ and that it’s ‘our ...”

“... of Scottish secession and perhaps Irish reunion. Another approaching hard rain is less obvious but more dangerous. This is the accelerating offensive of the Westminster executive against its restraints: against rival centres of power in Brussels or Edinburgh, against plural interpretations of history, against law itself. Most British governments since ...”

“... print – this is the second reissue of her two novels about Theseus since 2015 – she attracts a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her ...”

“... mother, I’d live abroad,’ the matron at Beaufront said to a girl called Amanda. ‘Jennifer is more a liability than an asset,’ read one report. Catherine Freeman recalled that at the Assumption Convent, then temporarily evacuated to Hereford, Mother Ida ‘habitually woke up an asthmatic friend of mine, Mary Bowen, by laughingly placing a pillow over ...”

“... They were also given simple tasks which they were required to do together. (This may be the much more gripping prototype of Big Brother, although in the modern version everyone in the house deludedly believes themselves to be celebrities or interesting.) At the first meeting Rokeach asked the three men their names. Joseph said: ‘My name is Joseph ...”

“... would better utilise ‘material resources … through improved process control’. More important, ‘expensive labour can be replaced with cheaper capital equipment.’ Cutting back on labour was not only value for money: it removed the unpredictable human factor.Iwas hired​ by the Houston office of Andersen Consulting straight out of an ...”

“... but outspoken spy, rumoured to have slept with ‘everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year’. He tried to coax informal revelations out of Roosevelt over lunch. He flirted with Ginger Rogers and Elizabeth Arden. He wrote The Gremlins (1943), about a pilot, for Walt Disney, but the film was never made. He slept ...”

“... drew on the surviving contemporary sources of the life and reign of the emperor, as well as more recent works in Latin, German, French, English and Italian, to imagine the dying Hadrian describing his life to his successor. Twenty years of writing, reading, thinking and travelling went into the novel. Several drafts were burned. But the most striking ...”

“... easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.’The same could be said today, more than half a century after the end of legal segregation. In 1989 five black and Latino teenagers, described by the police as a pack of ‘wilding’ youths, were wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. Donald ...”

“... in horrid nakedness’. Occasionally, he sees a little cornfield, which only serves ‘to impress more strongly the general barrenness’. As if to silence these romantic terrors, Johnson plays the calm 18th-century surveyor, and in portly periods begins an inquiry into the loch’s dimensions: Loch Ness is about 24 miles long and from one mile to two miles ...”

“... region had plenty of liberals, but a category that includes both Miranda – who corresponded with Thomas Paine, participated in the American and French Revolutions and led Venezuela’s break from Spain – and Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the politics that the term ...”

“... which, within the space of a few years, commissioned Ezra Pound’s letters from Paris and Thomas Mann’s from Vienna, ran an excerpt from Mrs Dalloway and the first English translation (by Burke) of Death in Venice; published The Waste Land, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’; and reviewed Ulysses, Marianne ...”

“... forties, has become a barrister, is married to the selfless Mary, and has two children, Robert and Thomas. Eleanor, Patrick’s mother, has had a stroke, and is immobilised and nearly speechless in a nursing home. But before her decline she was able to stiff her son one last time, by bequeathing the family home in the South of France to a devious New Age Irish ...”

“... writing poetry can blight the exercise of other talents, talents that might have led to success in more orthodox careers. Coleridge had, according to Eliot, been ‘visited by the Muse’ during his early manhood, but, the visitor having departed, he was ‘thenceforth a haunted man’. He had a talent for metaphysics and similar studies, but ‘he was ...”