“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... served his time as the ultimate insider. He offered a bridge between the traditionalist past and a more dynamic future. But he still needed the votes, and doubtless he and his supporters did whatever it took to secure them. (As Mandeville said of papal politics, Machiavelli is no guide: he isn’t cynical enough.) It took Wojtyla three days to get there – it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There are​ more weird households per novel in the work of Elizabeth Bowen than in that of any comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic family life ...”

“... Jerome, whose Latin Vulgate version survived to become the official Bible of the Catholic Church more than a thousand years later. The passage was often used to justify the bar on women priests. ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence’ because ‘Adam non est seductus, was not seduced; but the woman being ...”

“... in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of French internment policy, which was already ...”

“... by year almost regardless of his written efforts. Ellison rose up the celebrity ladder, but had no more secure social basis than he had possessed in his years of poverty. He had nothing, really, that could make him comfortable with the superior things he could do and knew he could do, except to try to do them at a continuous, towering level. It led, as we ...”

“... 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 ...”