“... Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the company of an American academic couple, the Vogelers, who are dispirited by the climate and by ...”

“... attachment to the conditions of their misery makes it difficult for them to develop happily and freely and without multiplying more misery around them. Dina, Yehuda’s hypnotically beautiful daughter-in-law, is still a virgin. She cannot break through her sexual inhibitions, consummate her marriage and have a child, because she needs her frigidity to ...”

“... J.P. Gell was dispatched in 1839 to start up the interdenominational Christ’s College at Hobart; John Buckland followed in 1846 to be headmaster of the Hutchins School. In his uncertainties over employment Clough kept open the antipodean possibility, making an unsuccessful application for a chair of Classics at Sydney in 1851. J.A. Froude, after the ritual ...”

“... while he was working on Found: This morning, Gabriel not yet having done his cart & talking quite freely about several days yet, having been here since the first Novr & not seeming to notice any hints, moreover the two children being here & one stupid girl insufficient for so much work Emma being within a week or two of her confinement & he having had his bed ...”

“... romancing the wonderful indifference of nature and its heroic explorers. Indeed, the loss of Sir John Franklin and his party during his search for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and ...”

“... creation became the basis for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more ...”

“... of communist demands for the institution of a powerful de Gaulle-style presidency in return for a freely elected senate, which Solidarity could control. This deal, as Ackerman says, ‘made short-term sense. But it was a disaster in the middle run, once Solidarity had swept the communists from their dominant position in the other branches.’ When Solidarity ...”

“... a compact book about Rothko’s life and art for Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series, drawing freely on the literary critic James Breslin’s impressive full-length biography of 1993. Unlike Breslin, she has little curiosity about Rothko’s darker side, preferring to see his life as an ongoing quest, as she puts it in her subtitle, ‘towards the light ...”

“... Museum) and the National Gallery. Piero della Francesca was a figure of special interest for both John Charles Robinson, an agent for South Kensington as well as for private collectors, and Charles Eastlake, the first director of the National Gallery, because of the extreme rarity of his portable pictures. There was only one work by him in any public – or ...”

“... for the world, since it is God who lies at the source of that freedom, and who has factored in my freely chosen actions. God did not force me to dress up as a parlourmaid and call myself Milly last Friday; but being omniscient, he knew that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with last Friday’s Milly business well in mind. There is no stopping ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly distended, chest flattened, long yellow ...”

“... worked in the dining-room, where her four daughters, servants, relatives and friends came and went freely. Long passages of narrative summary sometimes take the energy out of her work, as if she had been distracted for a while; characters are occasionally put on hold for chapters. But when it came to beginning a book or producing its central confrontational ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... he will speak pornographically about guns, rifles, rockets and weapons systems; he will deploy a freely offensive shorthand about everybody from the ‘Muj’ – the Mujahideen – to rag-headed Iraqi insurgents, knocking off a few corrupt Russians, useless journalists, greasy Serbs and ‘sound as a pound’ Scousers along the way. Sentimentality is the ...”

“... communication and conversation.’ But precisely because coffee houses were places where people freely spoke their minds on matters that were supposed to be none of their business, they were fertile fields for government spies. By the 1670s and 1680s, London’s coffee houses were swarming with informants, notably including their owners, who were ...”