“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... It was the last of Britain’s three (that we know of) national secret services to be founded, and has the lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ...”

“... scrambling computers) and superglue. The army is bankrupt, and the police force is disabled by corruption and general ineptitude. So – much like the 17th-century high seas – America’s highways are, de facto, beyond the law. It’s hard to distinguish between the homeless nomad ‘prole’ pirates and the military officers who set up road blocks ...”

“... on the edge of the spur of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula. It has been somewhat bypassed by Italy’s postwar development and has never been on the tourist circuit, or indeed had anything about it that might attract outsiders. The railway didn’t even reach it until 1931. To judge by the photo in the current ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... just tired. His cutlery is untouched, and his arms are hidden under the table, as if restrained by their own heft. ‘One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs,’ Shteyngart writes earlier in his book, just before he describes a family photo in which he’s lodged between his parents ...”

“... is my current beverage of choice; you won’t find cheaper outside Costco, which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David Foster Wallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted ...”

“... Maybe I took for granted that the BJP – which had made it clear that these elections were to be an endorsement of its record during its 18-month rule – would win as expected. But two things had happened to shake that certainty: the turnout, more than 56 per cent, was the highest in Bihar in 15 years; and a major news channel, CNN IBN, had released an ...”

“... The​ Labour Party may be the largest party after the next election, and it may even secure a majority, but it could also do very badly. These alternatives show Labour’s decline since the first couple of years of the coalition, when a Labour victory in 2015 was (more or less) confidently predicted. The change is reflected in the party’s mood: in the nerviness, the timidity and the stress-induced gaffes ...”

“... this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the Protestant Hanoverian line whose direct ...”

“... he grew up: the Old George Inn (‘delightful’), The Crown (with ‘a swirly carpet’, owned by a fraudster called Cyril), The White Hart, The King’s Arms (‘lobster thermidor’). He lists the secret vices of this world – ‘winklepickers, illegitimacy, tinned salmon, canals, hair cream’ – and its characteristic foods: ‘towers of ...”

“... parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a non-fiction novel that unpacks the story of Soviet economics (Red Plenty, 2010). He ...”

“... who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the Rev. George Austen, father of Jane, but proved a slow learner and had a serious stammer. Jane was still to be born at the time he lived in her home, but she encountered ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”