“... and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just ...”

“... placid obliviousness to her frightening circumstances was the way to signal that she might safely be released. To have shown distress, much less anger, would have been crazy. The infection in her brain was diagnosed on the morning of her discharge, the masquerade having been a success, when one of the doctors nevertheless thought to order a spinal tap. Why ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and the Holocaust, was performing a stand-up routine about sexual assault when he was heckled by a woman in the audience. ‘Rape jokes are never funny,’ she called out. Tosh allegedly responded: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?’ The ...”

“... treat it as such, as Brands does, is to miss its larger significance. Ending in what appeared to be a decisive affirmation of civilian control, it revealed the challenges inherent in reconciling democratic practice with the exercise of militarised global leadership: challenges that persist – in different form – in the presidency of Donald Trump. War on ...”

“... footage of UFOs taken from US military planes, officially declassified and approved for release by the US government, was published online by an organisation called To The Stars Academy. The first video of two – a third was released in March – was captured by a US Navy Super Hornet ...”

“... partisans, advancing a liberated national consciousness and such artistic truth as might be constructed on the wreckage of Mussolini’s regime.‘Freedom of expression and the need to rebuild a new Italian identity fuelled the fever for documentation, the testimony of real life, and investigation in a nationwide context,’ the curator and ...”

“... Economic Review in 2014, cheerfully conclude: ‘Decision-making ability, unlike preferences, may be justifiably manipulated.’ Just give the poor a bit of a nudge, and they’ll shape up.That was then. And as we now know, the libertarian paternalism of the Cameron and Obama governments gave us Brexit and Trump instead. As William Davies observes in Nervous ...”

“... that are more than metaphors, are not likely to go away.Literature is full of examples, which may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think of ...”

“... what a hard start in life he had. Even his name was scarcely his own. Mercy Bevin had six children by her husband William in the mining valleys of South Wales before they split up and she returned to her native Somerset village of Winsford, where quite a few years later she had a seventh child, Ernest, in 1881. Father unknown. Certainly Mercy never saw William ...”

“... independents, Greens and Reform augur a far stormier first term than once expected.It would be risible for Starmer to stand in Downing Street and invoke buoyant optimism. If this is a new dawn, it is an uncertain one. Starmer has been keen to remind voters of his ordinary upbringing and Everyman qualities, but he is evasive and mutable in his ...”

“... of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you are not a soldier; you can be of no use to us here.’ ‘Sir,’ answered Godfrey, ‘I run no more hazards than Your Majesty.’ ‘Not so,’ said William. ‘I am where it is my duty to be; and I may without presumption commit my life to God’s ...”

“... in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. It lies in the shadow of Benbulben, a plateau formed by Ice Age glaciers that is full of the fossils of extinct marine creatures. Out to sea reefs produce mountainous waves. It’s a place where men and their machines seem small. On 21 September 1588, three ships from the Levant squadron of the Spanish Armada were ...”