“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen has been in essays (those by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely superfluous figure in Jane ...”

“... worse fates: his siblings were incarcerated and one of his sisters killed herself.The fable of the prince in the cave, while broadly accurate, is merely the authorised story. The biographies published by the party all share the theme of Xi triumphing over adversity and working long hours for the party while managing to stay close to the soul of the people. In ...”

“... powerfully built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to ...”

“... the white emptiness of your glass & thought it would never be filled.’ There was something of Prince Mishkin about Jones: his confounding candour, his obstacle-like presence in the room. If you could not marry him it was unclear what finally was to be done with him. You could look out for him, as so many did, or confide in him, as did several straying ...”

“... names from the national memory? The public made Jimmy Savile. It loved him. It knighted him. The Prince of Wales accorded him special rights and the authorities at Broadmoor gave him his own set of keys. A whole entertainment structure was built to house him and make him feel secure. That’s no one’s fault: entertainment, like literature, thrives on ...”

“... was now off duty, visiting his fiancée. On the evening of 19 June, they were watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at her house in East Belfast when two masked gunmen knocked at the door and then forced their way inside. They shot Tony five times, killing him instantly.An investigation was launched and in February 1993 Noel Thompson, a taxi driver who had ...”

“... This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... always assumed that since Mercutio with cheerful derision calls his enemy ‘King of Cats’, ‘Prince of Cats’, making allusion to rat-catching and the possession of nine lives; and since furthermore Elizabethans appear to have called their Tom-cats, Tib-cats – then the chances are strong that our still-surviving habit of calling the occasional cat ...”

“... and its ties to bin Laden family assets; the influence in Washington of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar; no-bid contracts; and so on. But there is no need for conspiracy theories: never has a conspiracy been less interested in concealment. The report of the Energy Task Force led by Dick Cheney, which was crafted early in the Bush presidency by oil ...”

“... name of Tsentoroi – ‘i vsyo, that’s all.’ Civil servants, whom Russians ever since Peter the Great have called the chinovniki, also have to pay their dues. Every few months, all government employees, including policemen, doctors and teachers, are obliged to transfer a portion of their salary to the Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov Fund, or FAK, a private ...”

“... narratologists, who rejoice in the apparatus and the neologisms; they have what Gerald Prince, a senior narratologist himself, calls an ‘infatuation with science even when they are talking about the process of storytelling, something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning ...”

“... of plaited silk hung on the wall by the window in that same room where Ivan Ilyich and the old Prince died.’ She began to write an ‘exploration’, which Sargeson helped her sell. (It came out in 1957 as Owls Do Cry, marketed as a ‘novel’; in it, among other things, a boy, Toby Withers, struggles under the ‘velvet cloak’ of epilepsy.) Sargeson ...”