“... the stick-up thatch, the all-over-the-place arms and legs. Ross’s body resembled a huge question-mark, somebody said – perhaps too neatly. Thurber found it indescribable: those arms and legs were never still. ‘He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off.’ Harpo Marx said that Ross looked like a cowboy who ...”

“... The poet feels that he has ‘missed / The once-in-a-lifetime portent, / The comet’s pulsing rose’. And this resignation, or retirement, is political. The direct references to politics are sleeved in melancholy, subdued by the poet’s own disappointments. In his recent work, Heaney’s self-examination has become more oblique, but less resigned. In ...”

“... Here we meet not only the men whose millions came from steel, railways and beer, but those who rose on pills, cannon balls, guano, mustard, malted milk, chocolate, feathers, buttons, carpets, alpaca and funeral crêpe. Alan Bennett has told of a scholarly-looking gentleman who, after a visitor’s tour of Buscot Park, asked the lady on duty ‘Could you ...”

“... a prostitute, but leaves embarrassed and forlorn. He thinks about drugs: ‘He might even ask Rose to sell him some junk. He had not taken it before … but now the idea appealed to him powerfully. What was he saving himself for? Wasn’t hedonism as good a way as any?’ Half-hearted whoring, fighting and dissolution don’t make Clem feel any ...”

“... of much thinned siennas and umbers, with prods here and there of dun greens, whites and hot rose madder. To take the pictures in felt like slowly coming to in an unfamiliar bedroom. In each, the prods had gathered together to produce an Indian soldier. I enjoyed – and I felt that the painter had enjoyed – the visible process through which loose ...”

“... Yet his arguments for dividing political power hit home in America, and as the United States rose to prominence, its Montesquieuan model proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single elected assembly, rejecting ...”

“... to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest that a truly popular socialism ...”

“... proud to assert his respectability and distinguished connections, full of scorn for men who rose from humble backgrounds into the professions or the Church. He lived frugally and despised courtly ostentation, but those qualities mark him as godly, not as a man of the people. His views on government were shifting and ...”

“... of Basel before returning to marry, start a family and build a career in the linen trade. He rose to modest heights in St Gall’s government, amassed a reasonable fortune and formed cordial if rarely intimate relationships with the town’s intellectual elite. Rütiner was a convinced Protestant and a keen (though not particularly scholarly) reader, but ...”

“... and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was published, that association has become harder to sustain. The malign and the dangerous haven’t disappeared from the picture – far from it – but they’ve fallen away from the ...”

“... TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability of the ‘Zero Years’, as the 2000s are known, the moment when Yeltsin’s erratic improvisation gave way to the cold calculation personified in Putin. Economically, the prolonged ...”

“... all around you were either slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to ...”

“... criticism. Parker evidently thinks there has been too much bullshit in wine writing, that it’s a mark of corruption, and that both a simplified vocabulary for talking about wine and a more straightforward sensibility towards what makes wine good are ways of cleansing the Augean stables of the wine world. He’s a bluff, straightforward sort of guy and, if ...”

“... made immediately clear) who goes by the name of the Great Lindemann. This is a day that will mark a brutal discontinuity in the Friedlands’ family life, and a moment when narrative particles throng together like sand grains at the neck of an hourglass. Here is another overlap with the world of McEwan’s fiction, the uneasy harnessing of short story ...”

“... 1960s, even in traditional rice economies such as China and Japan. The supply of wheat in China rose from fewer than 200 calories per person a day in 1961 to nearly 600 in 2009. Across Asia, the gradual substitution of wheat for rice has been a near universal marker of economic development.The human relationship with wheat is the subject of Catherine ...”