“... the torch at midnight. The most celebrated (and photographed) visitors to I Tatti in the post-war period included such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was ...”

“... and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia’s most important dissident – when a potential rival emerged, doubtful ...”

“... and the city are fields, vastly enlarged since mechanised farming came in after the Second World War, mostly arable (wheat, barley, oilseed rape), with one big dairy farm, a member of an organic milk co-operative that is under contract to Dairy Crest PLC. The redundant farmhouses, stripped of all their surrounding land except pony-sized paddocks, are owned ...”

“... on settings of Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’ and the spine-chilling Lyke Wake Dirge, or in the War Requiem, where the point of greatest expressive intensity is felt less in the generalised terrors of the Dies Irae than in the private eeriness of the setting of Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped/Down some profound dull ...”

“... Césaire’s view of Martinique was a product of his birth into the island’s small Black middle class, distinct from its mixed-race (Mulâtre) and White middle classes. His parents – Fernand, the manager of a sugar plantation, and Eléonore, a seamstress – saw education as a route to social mobility. Fernand subjected his children to a strict regime of ...”

“... to unlimited revolutionary consequences. It would be easy to write this off as a case of governing-class paranoia; but though Burke may have had a paranoid personality, Gibbon did not, and in Lausanne he was out of touch with English collective opinion. We need to take account of the rapidity with which the Revolution convinced observers that they were living ...”

“... immigrant child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How ...”

“... now so dire as to be unignorable. The combined effects of the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid and war in Ukraine have resulted in economic conditions far graver than those on which McKinsey was consulted at the end of the 1990s. This reality can no longer be papered over with a successful financial services sector, discrete acts of redistribution or the ...”

“... wind and solar farms), but have no enthusiasm for public ownership. Britain’s political class remains unified in its belief that energy infrastructure must be owned by the private sector. Since privatisation in the 1980s, successive leaders have rejected any suggestion of nationalisation, despite the scale of the crisis facing the British energy ...”

“... of him. Although he had become famous for capturing the mood of a generation – left-wing, class-conscious – he couldn’t rest easy in the generation of a single mood. ‘Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings,’ he observed in a note to The Double Man (1941), and such feelings come to the fore when he’s on the move. ‘In Memory of ...”

“... the officers, the servants and an occasional emigrant or foremast hand. He pays great attention to class, finding most of the passengers and officers rather common, the exceptions being Miss Granham, a governess in her thirties whose father had been a canon; Mr Prettiman, a social philosopher, something like Shelley in background and political opinions but ...”

“... like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent everything I hate in ...”

“... to Paris, the involvement in the Resistance, the work for the Irish Red Cross at the end of the war, the partnership with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, the struggle to become a writer, and, of course, the attainment of ‘fame’. Cronin writes with considerable charm, though he also has a taste for blarney and cannot resist the irritating familiarity of ...”

“... could afford such an expenditure (it represented the entire weekly income of many working-class families), but sales to individuals were not the chief support of the system. That came from the bulk purchases of the circulating libraries, above all Mudie’s and to a lesser extent W.H. Smith’s, whose loan stock was tripled by the three-volume ...”

“... history of the world had four and a half decades without pandemic, countrywide disaster or world war, accompanied by unprecedented growth in corporate profits, and yet ordinary people’s pay remained the same. I think people would react with amazement and want to know why. Things have been getting consistently better for the ordinary worker, they would ...”