“... 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 ...”

“... Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A Likeness’ by his previous biographer Joan Richardson (I haven’t read her ...”

“... with residential apartheid and job discrimination as they moved North. A falsification that held more universal sway among whites than did any Stalinist rewriting of history in the Soviet Union transformed black Americans in the post-bellum South from victims of re-subjugation into political and sexual predators. A century after the Civil War, a ...”

“... in Prussia of less than 2 per cent of the relevant age-group; university education was even more restricted. As it happens, this maximised the chances of the children of disproportionately prosperous small communities such as the Jews, especially given the high status that learning enjoyed among them. That is why the Jewish share in Prussian higher ...”

“... Growth Pact adopted at Amsterdam on 16 June this year, the Governments of the Union must not spend more than they receive in taxes and other income each year than the equivalent of 3 per cent of their state’s national product. If they overspend that limit this year, or plan to do so next, they will not be permitted to take part in the common currency zone to ...”

“... and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters (Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson) and more than a million words of diaries – work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was. The two things people know about ...”

“... were run up for them on the premises. By 1966, Carnaby Street was overrun with ‘buyers from the more staid clothes retailers who have come to spy out what the young are buying next’.The consumer boom owed much to the rise of the office, itself a result of the inexorable growth of the service sector and the Tory government’s decision in 1954 to lift ...”

“... 1924 Edwin had published an article called ‘Women – Free for What?’ in which, channelling Thomas Carlyle, he wrote that ‘the age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work.’ It was Edwin who sent Women: An Inquiry to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, but ...”

“... December 2007.) Never before have the flaws of the Eurozone been so clearly exposed. We can expect more Greek drama before too long: the real struggle over the Eurozone – and the EU more broadly – is just beginning. If nothing else, Alexis Tsipras has demonstrated to the world that the Eurozone does not operate according ...”

“... both cheeks.’ And it was not just his furrows and hollows, it was his make-up: ‘We often see more hideous old men; but what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white paint with which he glistened.’ The man also wore a light ...”

“... against pilfering slaves. His rigourcaused him to be disliked, and determined one among them, more heartless, perhaps, than the rest, to undertake his destruction. On Christmas day, Mr Brown rode to … a neighbouring estate, and upon his return in the evening … he met with his untimely death.The slave to whom Mr Brown had rendered himself particularly ...”

“... complete biography lurks behind the slow accumulation of these pages. We begin, what could be more boyish, with descriptions of the ‘wild dark-grey trousers’ of Cambridge, with paeans to Rupert Brooke, with bubbling appreciations of not very good poetry. He is an émigré, and unmistakeably happy to be at work building his name: this happiness is what ...”

“... then joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys. Although the more sensational aspects are Houellebecq’s invention, this character shares a great deal of his mother’s biography: she too was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant ...”

“... Bonheur as a daddy’s girl, the memoir written by her final companion, Anna Klumpke, describes a more complicated relationship. Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre is an odd hybrid of first-person testimony coupled with extended sections of ventriloquism, where Bonheur narrates her life in her own words. (The long overdue English translation, by Gretchen van ...”

“... I travelled with him in India, and I saw him in hospital in London just before he died in 2018.More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet it is only in the last few years, the dust having settled, that I have seen how complex our relationship was, how important – how crucial – it was to my becoming a writer.To ...”