“... her grandmother’s childhood, are the foundations of Gray’s biography. Landemare’s father, Mark Young, was coachman to the Liberal MP Cyril Flower. Her mother, Mary, had been in service until her marriage, and the family belonged to what Gray calls ‘the affluent working class’. Between Aldbury, the picturesque but poor village where Landemare was ...”

“... gravel of Martyrs’ Square in central Beirut, where early in the 20th century Lebanese patriots rose up against the Ottoman Empire and were slaughtered. The statue in the square commemorating their deaths is pockmarked with bullet holes from the civil war. There is a carnival atmosphere of the kind that often accompanies collective political ...”

“... for the obvious reason that language changes over time. A translation that once seemed to hit the mark will later seem stale or imprecise. What’s more, in this case, there isn’t even agreement on what should count as the original text. Marxists continue to debate whether Le Capital in the first French edition should be seen as a welcome improvement on the ...”

“... of the obvious connections between the life and the death of us. And how the rituals by which we mark the things that only happen to us once, birth and death, or maybe twice in the case of marriage, carry the same emotional mail – a message of loss and gain, love and grief, things changed utterly. And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made faeces an ...”

“... her decks. Within minutes the liner listed to starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The ...”

“... to the point of – horrors! – being no analyst at all, but a therapist. The new feminism rose up against the man who had reported that little girls and little boys set out different play configurations in the consulting room. Overall, the fact that his work was, by intention, interdisciplinary, made him the target for accusations of lack of ...”

“... ten places on the UN Human Development Index between 1990 and 2000, even though per capita income rose from $368 to $2000. Shaxson provides some vivid glimpses into the misery of these seemingly rich nations, but his real concern is to explain how and why they have failed so badly. He is sceptical of the left-wing tendency to see the problem in terms of ...”

“... foreign policy priorities. A Protestant by conviction before his late turn to agnosticism, Rocard rose through the Parti Socialiste Unifié, which opened a dialogue with Yasir Arafat in 1969. He went on to develop ties with Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO’s representative in Paris, who was cleared for diplomatic status by the French foreign office in 1970.Unlike ...”

“... this low-lying English district, a reclaimed wetland with barely a free plot above the high-water mark on a spring tide, was still building out. Surely the barrier had been built to protect lives and existing property unluckily stranded in a climate change danger zone, not to enable new houses to be built into peril? Robinson laughed. ‘In a very simplistic ...”

“... if Waller could have summoned the discipline to write more songs as fine as his ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’, ‘Keeping out of Mischief Now’, ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ and ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’, he still couldn’t have come close to satisfying the demands placed on him by his own success and the executives at RCA ...”

“... Or should I say Ms?’ I smiled weakly, as I always do, and proffered ‘Why don’t you call me Rose?’ which created a little stir, as it is not my name. On the way back Mr Simister said that he considered it a great success, more than somewhat, and was sure they were all most grateful. My hands were clammy from the touch of the science fantasists, there ...”

“... Emma ‘the original desperate housewife’, which, cheesy though it sounds, isn’t far off the mark. Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel. At least none of those 15 translators ...”

“... still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ...”

“... and expensive project entailing far larger commitments than it had made thus far – Washington rose to the occasion with a sixfold increase in the value of defence equipment supplied to the kingdom. The wall, which eventually stretched for 1200 miles north-east to south-west across the territory, swung the military situation against Polisario. The valuable ...”

“... strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that ...”