“... pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter looking at cosmetics. ‘And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of ...”

“... how the story of his play, Orvet, was inspired by his survival in a car crash which killed his best friend; and in 1963 he tells a New York Times journalist that the idea for La Grande Illusion came to him when, while shooting Toni, he crossed paths with a pilot who had saved his life many years earlier. Both in the letters and in Ma vie et mes films we ...”

“... blur of his mufti. ‘Are you filming?’ he said. ‘Filming what?’ said the cameraman, James Nicholas. The priest said: ‘Please don’t show this family.’ James reached along the stock of the camera and flicked a switch. Trimming what you film has become second nature in the province. Camera crews do not favour the faces of RUC officers; the cabbies ...”

“... did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus Company in 1985. The ‘thinking’ behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a vast ...”

“... kind, its sum is not greater than its component parts, which vary widely in quality. Perhaps the best essay – J.G.A. Pocock’s – is also one of the few which attempt to define radicalism. It reassesses WASP political ideologues between 1688 and 1776 and admits some oppositional Tories and some capitalists to a share in virtu. Christopher Hill supplies ...”

“... Amidst a grief-stricken population Solzhenitsyn wanted to jump for joy. Much as the death of Nicholas I ultimately made the suspension of Dostoevsky’s permanent exile possible, so now events were set in train that would lead to the rise of Khrushchev, de-Stalinisation and Solzhenitsyn’s own rehabilitation. Before this could happen, however, it seemed ...”

“... Street tremble), but the length – almost twelve hours. This was an attempt (as was the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby) to dramatise the whole of a serious book and never mind how long it takes. The distillation and elision that have always been the main concern of adapters suddenly seem out-dated. Harold Pinter’s reduction of Remembrance of Things Past to 163 ...”

“... As Patrick explains to his friend Johnny Hall, ‘I happen to think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since … well, since my father’s death.’ This gruesome story is no doubt given much of its power by the fact that Patrick and his family are portraits from life – ‘uninvented’, as St Aubyn has said. The author was raped by ...”

“... from pre-Presidential days.’ They included Cecil Spring Rice, an Englishman who had served as best man at his wedding and had been in the British Embassies at Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg, and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory MP. According to Morris, ‘their urbane, literate reports’ kept Roosevelt up to date ‘with court affairs and privileged ...”

“... religious orders. He was one of the most admired dons of his generation and, for McFarlane, the best evidence of Wyclif’s eminence is that it was almost universally acknowledged, even by his enemies. Even Archbishop Arundel conceded that he was ‘a great clerk’. Evans tells us as much and more about the study and pursuit of logic, philosophy and ...”

“... them and improvised a dance to the music, concluding by pointing to that painting which he felt best expressed what he had just danced. As Butler recounts, in what is really the centrepiece of his book, Kandinsky was so excited by hearing a concert of Schoenberg’s music in 1911 that he wrote immediately to the composer and struck up a relationship with ...”

“... of his own convictions. Not only do they subscribe to his belief that the history of Parliament is best studied through the Commons’ membership, but they also accept his view that that analysis demonstrates the growing political ascendancy of the Lower House. Dr Hasler’s introductory survey adds a great many tables on a great many social questions to those ...”

“... always been suspected (quite correctly) of being homosexual, not suitable for Linden Hills. The best man recites a verse during his congratulatory speech. It is by Walt Whitman – ‘Whoever you are, holding me now in hand ...’ – and the best man has changed ‘he’ to ‘she’ throughout. Only young Willie ...”

“... evening.’ That, to the extent that it’s fair to judge from these letters, is what she liked best: jolly jokes evenings with her friends. She was witty (‘that’s the cosiest Fan tutte I’ve ever heard,’ she said after she and her friends had been listening to it round an open fire with cushions and blankets); gave good, and when she was married to ...”

“... Brotherhood’s strong showing in the 2005 parliamentary elections. Liberal champions, notably Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen in the New York Times, applauded the protesters for focusing on Egypt, rather than on America or Israel: the ‘Arab mind’, Cohen declared, was at last showing signs of maturity, shedding its obsession with American and Zionist ...”