“... the nape of a neck, the exposed back of one hand, and a tentative, slipper-clad foot. Crude they may be, yet without these sisterly gleanings we would know next to nothing of Austen’s face or figure or how she held herself in space: dead at 42 in 1817, she is part of that last, infinitely poignant, generation of human beings who lived and died before ...”

“... individualism to an imperial appetite and the project of continental expansion. Turner’s insight may sound like common sense: once the last frontier has closed, Americans will have to teach themselves how to live, and at just that point the New World will cease to be new. But we have never come to that point, says Fisher. He is pretty sure we never will. And ...”

“... was one thing, taste quite another: ‘According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes.’ This is a rare instance, Hume noted, of proverbial common sense agreeing with philosophy. I like the Château Talbot 1983; you like Wynn’s ...”

“... from the various thens and elsewheres her wounded memory dredges up.Male readers (in particular) may be startled by the way Rosa’s experience of sexual assault acquires the status of countersubject. It is somehow communicable, unlike her experiences with her brother, even potentially an agent of bonding:Unspoken, not hidden, a nod reallythe night we both ...”

“... he complained that Roe made a lot of suppositions about the kinds of people Wordsworth may have known or may have met in order to fill in the blanks in his life story. Roe’s book does indeed say things like Wordsworth ‘could well have been’ among the Anglo-Jacobins who met at White’s Hotel in Paris in ...”

“... activité, vitesse!’ Similar, too, was Cromwell’s disregard for casualties. Milder historians may argue that the massacres at Drogheda and Wexford during his conquest of Ireland in 1649 were ‘typical casualties of 17th-century warfare’. But even they find it hard to stomach Cromwell’s pious crowing over the Irish, his determination to see his ...”

“... norms’.The qualifier ‘openly’ suggests that the most objectionable thing about Trump may be his discarding of the veil that conceals the scramble for power and wealth among the traditional ruling classes. Mounk does not consider the possibility that the official mendacity concerning illegal wars and assaults on civil liberties ...”

“... farmers went bust and labourers left the land in droves. Even Adam Smith conceded thathumanity may require that the freedom of trade should be restored only by slow gradations, and with a good deal of reserve and circumspection. Were those high duties and prohibitions taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast ...”

“... it was part of 107 acres of pasture and gardens he bought in 1602. A minor amendment to his will may also hold a clue. It originally concluded with the formulaic phrase, ‘in witnesse whereof I have hereunto put my seale,’ but in the final version of 25 March 1616 the word ‘seale’ is crossed out and ‘hand’ is written instead. Had he recently lost ...”

“... which he believed his due. For him there was only the bitterness of the dishonoured prophet.’ He may be roughly right if ‘impact’ is measured in terms of immediate practical consequences, but his insistence that the book was widely derided by supporters of the Revolution, and did not cut much ice with the political Right, whether in England or ...”

“... are two problems with these accounts. First, the test of Orange Herald was held on Friday, 31 May: it would not have been physically possible for the story to appear before the following Monday. In other words, the journalists wrote their stories in advance of the test, on the basis of a briefing from Brigadier Jehu, who had seen the first test – Short ...”

“... public seems more aware of. A similar moral seemed to emerge from Jake’s Thing (1978), which you may reasonably regard as Amis’s best novel if you have not yet read Stanley and the Women. Jake is conned by the Zeitgeist into thinking his middle-aged impotence a disability, and undergoes a series of humiliating public treatments for it, until he comes to ...”

“... shows little difference in method from the principle of observation in the Diary itself, and this may have been deliberate policy on her part. She would write as she observed, and in the first plan for The Years, to be called ‘The Pargiters’, she envisaged something ‘leading naturally on to the next stage, the essay-novel’. That is what all her novels ...”

“... Riad Salameh, the disgraced head of the central bank, after the 2019 financial collapse. Nasrallah may have been right to lead Hizbullah into politics, but his critics were right to warn that the Lebanese system would corrupt the party and chip away at his own reputation for integrity.But no decision by Nasrallah was more damaging to his party’s standing ...”

“... cloud once more.’ Mallory and Irvine were never seen again. The record books tell us that on 29 May 1953, three days before the coronation of our present beleaguered Queen Elizabeth II, Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Hillary and Namgyal Wangdi, a devoutly Buddhist Sherpa, or poorly-paid professional climber, known by his spiritual title, Tenzing Norgay ...”