“... plentiful in her difficult marriage to the austere and often deeply depressed philosopher of law, John Austin. The confidences Sarah Austin unfolds in letter after letter are akin to a disrobing of her personality, even her person, as she reveals and boasts about her sensuality, passionate nature, physical attractions and sexual interests. The circumstances ...”

“... million cars had been fitted with defeat devices, most of them in Europe. Fines and compensation took the company to the brink: five years ago, when Ewing published his book, ‘it was not hard to imagine a worst-case scenario in which the total cost would add up to $50 billion or more. That sum might be enough to force Volkswagen into ...”

“... The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some kind of radical in a vaguely European sense. In Ireland, he knew that the real issue was the ownership of land. In 1893 he canvassed against Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill on the grounds that it would exacerbate the question of land ...”

“... to read about the way in which he lived his life and continue to take him as seriously as he took himself. Once he is seen as a whole, and the image of the fearsomely boisterous social climber, lover and businessman is overlaid on the more familiar image of the chastely deskbound author, Balzac appears as a monstre sacré, hypnotic and appalling by turns ...”

“... and the two became comrades. Dickens was the older by a dozen years and literary immortal. He took an interest in Wilkie’s career, which was rather slow to get off the ground, while Wilkie catered to Charles’s off-duty and extramarital needs for ‘amiable dissipation and unbounded license’, mainly in the form of jaunts to Paris and other ...”

“... who is behind all the bribes’ – which they alleged to be worth many millions of dollars. John Cripton, a Canadian impresario who had booked the Maryinsky/Kirov on foreign tours for ten years, said that Vinogradov used to demand additional payments on every contract. Vinogradov denies everything, and – now out on bail – has continued to work at ...”

“... When John Major ascended to 10 Downing Street, the wits were at first unsure quite how to set about him. There was the obvious, the elementary ‘grey’ approach: the Burton suits, the haircut, the delicious fry-ups and so on. On this reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J ...”

“... cracked, does not tell the truth’ – and the resulting distortions are, in a sense, John Wilson Foster’s subject in his impressive new scrutiny of the revival era (roughly the period between 1890 and the early 1930s). The word ‘fictions’ in Foster’s title denotes both fictional themes and concomitant misbeliefs: for example, about the ...”

“... Many years later, in the ‘worn memorial’ of the Baker Street buffet under Chiltern Court, John Betjeman sought inspiration for his poem ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, with its opening invocation: ‘Early Electric! With what radiant hope/Men formed this many-branched electrolier’. A stained glass windmill and ‘sepia views of leafy lanes in ...”

“... that I was doing anything but trying to make people laugh when I threw my custard pies and took my pratfalls,’ Keaton said, but he starred in Beckett’s movie Film (1965) nevertheless. For his part, in 1956, Lahr debuted Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on Broadway.In the spectacle they made of themselves, these clowns brought with them unexamined ...”

“... classed as a ‘heavy worker’. Nor was he the head of the household: that was his father-in-law, John Coomber, who had been a sailor in the royal and merchant navies. Now, at 46, he was employed by the government at Woolwich Arsenal ‘making war medals’, which sounds dismal and more like a postwar employment scheme than a real job. The only two living ...”

“... the Alamein dinner, to which I looked forward with keener and keener anticipation. Indeed, like John Osborne waiting for Max Miller to come on stage in whatever provincial repertory theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the ...”

“... asked for five dollars by four black teenagers answered that he indeed had something for them, took out a handgun and proceeded to blast away, wounding three and leaving one crippled for life. His main defence was that he was threatened by the look in their eyes. (‘What was that look? ... Hunter! ... Predator!’) All this was horrific enough, but the ...”

“... Susan Carruthers sets out to explore the long and surprisingly complicated story of the ‘Dear John’ break-up letter sent by American women to US troops serving overseas. But her account offers insights into a broader entanglement, involving the militarism that shores up modern nationhood; the emotional and sexual ties that sustain and can destroy men in ...”

“... She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if reporting a fact, but it is inhabiting her consciousness as her instant response ...”