“... deeply flawed’), he told her he was ‘an argumentative, perpetually horny, middle-aged man’. (He’s 48.) Leathers said they had phone sex, used the word ‘love’ and discussed procuring a Chicago condo for a romp. (They never did meet in person.) She cast herself as a spurned victim at first but quickly gave that up. Now she just cashes ...”

“... warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother who insisted that he was baptised into the Anglican Church. This turned out to be a false start. His father, Alfred, when ...”

“... Paul Auster​ ’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley; Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson ...”

“... where the ruthless, calculating woman, in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled ...”

“... Is she a prostitute? Not really, but she isn’t a wife either (at least not the wife of the man she is having the affair with). She is something in between. She may be a girlfriend who hopes to parlay her position into that of wife when the opportunity arises. She may be a kind of second spouse, who lives with all the trappings of domesticity and bears ...”

“... by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including hagiography ...”

“... makes up a word: sound, appearance, texture, the way it is articulated or intoned. Take ‘Larmes de jeune fille’ (1947), which Isou wrote after his move to Paris :M dngoun, m diahl Θ1hna îouhsn îoun înhlianhl M2pna iouvgaîn set i ouf! saî iaffln plt i clouf! mglaî vafΛ3o là îhî cnn vîisnoubidi î pnn mîiA4gohà îhîhî gnn gîThe Greek ...”

“... of recherché locutions (mouvance, primum movens, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi, coup de main, plumpes Denken, kataplexis, animus pugnandi, lapsus calami, ante diem, to cite just a few from this book). Two great works of historical synthesis, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, both published in 1974, earned ...”

“... through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many years of genteel prosperity, selling his ...”

“... Scots and Caledonian Antisyzygy. More than once he was accused of dictionary-grubbing: the drunk man looking at a thistle speaks under the influence of Jamieson’s – the dictionary, not the Scotch. There’s disingenuousness also in that Whitmanesque world-embrace: like most poets who wrote in dialect, MacDiarmid used it to nourish his identity with the ...”

“... from the 80-year-old daughter of one of his victims, General van Tongeren: Barbie was a small man, with a healthy look and a smooth face. His face was square, but rounded at the corners. The most striking thing about that face was the bitter, tight lips, like a thin slash across his face from which now and then a cutting, sarcastic remark emerged. And his ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots? My natural bent is to think that he is chatting the man up: I do not find him saying such things in his official correspondence with Paris; nor do I find that on such grounds kings and councillors made their decisions about the destinies of state and church. Not Queen Elizabeth, who would surely have giggled if ...”

“... that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he warned, would once again set it alight. Toussaint died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803. Every Haitian schoolchild knows his last words by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San ...”

“... moment in his career. His most utopian vision of future socialism, the work coincided with the old man’s forced departure from his paper (in which it was serialised), the Commonweal, and with his resignation from the Socialist League, ousted as a sentimental fogey by the new militant generation of theorised anarchists. Thereafter, Morris’s few remaining ...”

“... interviews as tirelessly as ever, but the years went by and the brief first volume of the Histoire de la Sexualité, published in 1976, was still without its projected sequels. As the world’s eyes turned increasingly upon him, he seemed more and more reluctant to commit himself to the permanence of print. Most of one and about half of another of those ...”