“... pronouncements – the Judge tells her that the marriage is at an end. As compensation, Manka may take from the house whatever she likes best. Manka likes the Judge best: she drugs and transports him to her father’s house. In the face of this about-turn, so to speak, the Judge has finally to admit her as a legal partner in both senses of the term. A ...”

“... is rude to no one whom he is likely to meet again. Students inexpert in reading between the lines may be tempted toward some dull books. Still, Morrill combines, as few scholars of his energy can, a firm independence of judgment with a reluctance to create an orthodoxy or an empire. The book is hearteningly latitudinarian. Even so, its perspective could ...”

“... who is not Isla. Matured perhaps by his mainland adventure, Spike thinks his mother’s illness may be related to his father’s failure to care for her, and plans another journey to the mainland, this time with Isla, in search of the doctor his father will not consult. When we see that Jamie associates the doctor, Kelson (played by Ralph Fiennes), with a ...”

“... made against the government by Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme at 6.07 a.m. on 29 May 2003. (Lloyd refers to Gilligan’s story as the ‘original’ report, as if what went before – you know, the invasion of Iraq, the intelligence dossier justifying the invasion etc – weren’t relevant.) Gilligan’s report was bad journalism, and was ...”

“... and royal warrants want up to date selling spaces. Bootmakers and wine merchants in St James’s may play up antiquity and preserve battered shutters and ripe mahogany but they are the exception. The timeframe of architecture is longer than that of retailing, and conflicts arise. Planners and landlords may discipline ...”

“... we’re haring around Oxford with Rimington’s characters – quite a few of them muttering ‘May Allah be with you’ – and feeling she’s got the hang of it. Oxford works well as the setting for her dénouement and allows her to make the hard-boiled point, dear to writers of related genres, that you needn’t be clever to be bright. As Blackwell’s ...”

“... government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office may have been the result of a proper disinclination on the part of a man who knew that his talents were inappropriate. He was accused by some of laziness.’ One conclusion of Brown’s biography, which was based on his Edinburgh PhD, was that the charge of ...”

“... the middle two-thirds of the 20th century and a second rise over the past generation. The story may be most surprising to economists. Piketty tells it explicitly to correct the optimistic theory Simon Kuznets proposed in 1955, which was widely accepted in the profession, that inequality lessens as economies mature. If Piketty is correct, the extremes of ...”

“... dead lie round’, surely he is suggesting that the wisdom here isn’t just a worldly wisdom, but may contain something more. What is the difference, then, between this ‘someone’ of Larkin’s with ‘a hunger in himself to be more serious’ and the voice at the end of ‘Little Gidding’ who states: ‘We shall not cease from exploration’? Poets have ...”

“... are interpreted as proof, and Covid becomes the string on which any and all conspiracy theories may be threaded. Seen through the conspiracist filter, by forcing us to wear masks, by closing bars and isolating the frail elderly, by trying to terrify us over, as they see it, a dose of flu, or by microwaving us with 5G, the secret elite has shown its hand.Now ...”

“... writes white: ‘After which Bob and I      .’ The type for these provoking blanks may be a boyhood diary he recalled keeping; a strange incident had occurred when he was sent for a walk on the Downs near Eastbourne by his prep-school headmaster, and had been induced to masturbate a middle-aged man behind some gorse bushes (‘Dear little ...”

“... not to live, in short, where one does live!’ Where one does live, or does not, as the case may be. He alludes to a literary colleague as ‘slowly dying’, and then reflectively describes another as ‘slowly living’; crammed as it was with goings-on, the essential inward writer’s rhythm of James’s own life was a slowly-dying and ...”

“... there are between 12,000 and 15,000 letters by James in existence and suggested that many more may still be in private hands (he calculated that James may have written as many as 40,000 letters in his lifetime, many of them now lost). Some further unpublished letters had by then appeared in other editions, notably a ...”

“... he found some wispy ‘not very reliable’ references suggesting that a dealer called Tawadros may have existed, and that he may have had a shop near Shepheard’s Hotel – previously the Hotel des Anglais, where spies and German generals used to gather. But there were no photographs or any other evidence of Tawadros ...”

“... Andy Seaman​ felt out of place when, on 26 May 2022, he walked into the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. Andy has little connection to Ireland; he’s from East London and his family’s roots are in Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma ...”