“... strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. It took little time for Edward Young’s fully-formed new sentence, ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’ (1742), to become tomorrow’s proverb. ‘Old soldiers never die’ (Foley, 1920) is undying. ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the ...”

“... is so convincingly specified that it explains the development of others whose treachery took a different form and was therefore known by a different name, if indeed it was classified at all: Bran well Brontë, for example, who had inspired in me nothing but a passing irritation before, but who, I came to think, had so much in common with William ...”

“... macabre. A more recent column shows Marquez feeding not only books but live authors to Castro: he took Graham Greene with him to Havana to meet with the Comandante. In his latest collection of dim-witticisms, Marquez gives rave notices to the spectacle of a tyrant posing for writers as frequently as Napoleon sat for painters: all laurels and a branch of green ...”

“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... of letters, when he read his son’s earlier novels; Arthur Waugh, not unlike Isaac D’Israeli, took a quizzical view of his son’s upper-class fantasies.) Brideshead Revisited (hence its appeal to the Americans) is not a picture of what the world is like: rather, a carefully painted canvas of what Waugh would like the world to be like. Again, like ...”

“... The Guineans gawped at such efforts (which they would never have dreamt of making themselves), but took the fact of competition in their stride. There was even a period when Mongolia entered the fray, claiming their country to be the perfect model of how to modernise a nomadic, non-Christian, cattle-based society. Similar bizarre competitions flowered in other ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

“... like all children in this type of situation, I think – to protect him, resuscitate him.’ He took a job as the deputy headmaster of a secondary school in Orléans, and the family moved into a staff apartment. When she had nothing to do at the weekends, Serre roamed the empty school and wrote a book – in part, she says, to seduce her philosophy ...”

“... L. Clemens, a deeply impressionable boy who resisted all entreaty to improve until the grave took him at 74 and closed the case. There is no point in trying to sort out fiction and reality in Hannibal-St Petersburg, or to distinguish ‘Huck’ from the real Tom, or ‘Tom’ from the real Sam. The life went into the books with such fidelity that the ...”

“... lifelong curiosity about Eastern literatures and languages, which began with the Bible and soon took him to Islam’s sacred scriptures. The West-Eastern Divan, which he began between 1814 and 1815, is a long, elaborate lyric cycle which draws on Persian and Arabic verse forms, themes and imagery, and sings fervent praises to Oriental attitudes towards ...”

“... Revolution was gathering pace, as some of the 20th century’s most durable corporatist structures took shape in an increasingly authoritarian climate. The footage Eisenstein took of athletic parades, and of politicians and churchmen in particular, alarmed Sinclair, who later described it as ‘fascist in tone’. But he was ...”

“... one of the owners. That might explain why he had so much time for the Glazer brothers after they took over the business in 2005 and loaded it up with debt, outraging many supporters who thought their club was being turned into a private cash cow. A group of them called on Ferguson to resign to show his solidarity with the ordinary fans who were being ...”

“... in Bernard over these years,’ Williams concluded long after the fact. In 1970 Bernard left; it took Shirley ten years to get an annulment. She lived through the 1970s largely on her own. She had eclipsed Castle as Labour’s most prominent woman, but she had no one at home to praise her or, as Labour’s fratricidal wars began, help her find her ...”

“... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...”

“... once those interventions were well underway, not before, that the London attacks of 7 July 2005 took place. It doesn’t make sense for Cameron to argue that air attacks on Raqqa will help prevent IS attacks on London, when the recent attacks in Paris happened 14 months into an intensive series of air raids on and around IS-held areas, led by the world’s ...”