“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Basilicata, a remote province at the instep of the Italian boot, was the first and remains the best-known of the various forms of documentary fiction that appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s.There was also a photographic analogue, abetted by the proliferation after 1945 of new illustrated journals such as Il politecnico, and various ethnographic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or wrestled with – this balance of the necessary and the random throughout her career. Her best novels, which also happen to be those that appeal most to her readers – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means and A Far Cry from Kensington – moisten the stringency of her vision with what one might call the wetness of life. They are ...”

“... Ronnie Cornwell was, according to Alan Clark’s brother Colin (one of his many victims), ‘the best conman ever’: I had never seen anyone who looked so trustworthy in my life. He was your favourite uncle, your family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas all rolled into one. He was stout and beaming with white hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a ...”

“... produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some converted to ...”

“... his political sympathies were apparently royalist. Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes ...”

“... most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who ...”

“... a stock satirical type for a whole group of minor writers: Kniazhnin, Kheraskov, Fonvizin. The best known work of this kind is Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, whose main character, Chatsky, on returning home from abroad, finds Russian life intolerable and flees it once again. Travel writers of the time, however, found little to praise when they ventured ...”

“... James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude. They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists – in ...”

“... Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more ...”

“... Ezra Pound wrote in his 1930 essay ‘Small Magazines’, but Brooker and Thacker do their best to reconstruct them. One point of departure, in Britain at least, was the early 19th-century tradition of the quarterly review. The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802), the Quarterly Review (1809), Blackwood’s (1817) and the Westminster Review ...”