“... religion ‘as stupidly as possible’. When Alyosha asks him why, Ivan first says he wanted to be characteristically Russian: ‘Russian conversations on these subjects are all conducted as stupidly as possible.’ Then he says: ‘And second, the stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason ...”

“... that her father was the playwright and politician Thomas Brinsley Sheridan. Such parentage would be far more in accordance with Caroline’s character and behaviour than that of her official father. Douglass finds the balance of evidence against it, yet it remains an attractive possibility. Caroline had an unsettling upbringing, though it was not as ...”

“... further apart. Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose agreement in fact makes gloomy sense. On the one hand, for the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach ...”

“... Lord Irvine, was dismissed in a cabinet reshuffle. It was announced, not to Parliament but by press release, that his office was not to be filled and that his department was to become part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, headed by a newly appointed minister, Lord ...”

“... goes on: ‘I love it here; real mad fun. Especially the evening game of gin rummy before beddy-by (9.30); the 8 p.m. cup of cocoa.’ The letter was written on 15 November 1951, a few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his ...”

“... written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain. Take, for instance, the conclusion. It is sententious, but we may feel that two hundred ...”

“... Margaret Rhondda, a peeress in her own right, campaigned energetically, albeit unsuccessfully, to be allowed to take her seat in the House of Lords. Hilda Matheson was 32 in 1920 and newly appointed political secretary to Nancy Astor. She appears on the cover of Michael Carney’s biography, first published in 1999 and recently reissued, photographed in ...”

“... words ‘BON’ and ‘HOMME’ are clearly legible on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took ...”

“... of thousands of civilian deaths from bombing – amounted to about 1 per cent of the population. By comparison, almost a fifth of the total population of Poland died, most of them civilians and, more often than not, Jewish. Soviet deaths, more than half of them civilian, topped twenty million, forty times the American number and about 12 per cent of the ...”

“... We​ had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband lost half of his blood volume after a bowel resection in 2022, after the 47 days in the desert during which I personally tended his wound, the calendar had become meaningless, as had numbers ...”

“... to access our coding work. The laptops we carried weighed at least five kilogrammes and couldn’t be used for actual programming. One of our clients was a matchmaking company, which operated a number of neighbourhood storefronts where lonely hearts could flick through albums with the pictures and profiles of potential partners and leave messages in numbered ...”

“... the Golan Heights and the Sinai. Nasrallah was killed under a fusillade of eighty bombs dropped by the Israeli air force on his headquarters in Haret Hreik, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A few hours earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu had addressed the UN General Assembly, denouncing the organisation as a cesspool of antisemitism and vowing to press on with ...”

“... was really true. I hated earrings. I hated police cars and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.Vance’s parents, Beverly and Donald Bowman, separated ‘around the time I started walking’, and he went years without seeing his father. ‘He became kind of a phantom.’ His mother ...”

“... and associate of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was the world’s third richest man. By the end of the month he had lost much of his fortune, after being accused by the US-based research investment firm Hindenburg Research of pulling the ‘largest con in corporate history’. Facing allegations of fraud and a ...”

“... parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped along by the empathetic rush of the new drug. Raves were initially met with curiosity by local police officers stumbling across warehouses full of smiley, chatty people. But as the parties grew, they were soon deemed a threat. In ...”