“... life, the elusive same-sex life of women, portraits of a crumbling high society, a world war, and much more. And of course, it includes the story of a novel in the writing, either this one or one deceptively like it. Fashions change in the interpretation of these matters, and much depends on the way we see Proust’s relation to his narrator. My ...”

“... you would be in extraordinary pain, or would have puerperal fever, or would be dead. In antenatal class, I was told that giving birth on your back is itself an artefact of history. Our teacher said that Louis XIV ordered his mistresses to give birth on their backs because he liked a clear view; Louis set a fashionable precedent that made labour longer and ...”

“... the studio of Apelles?Armed with such classical precedents, painters increasingly behaved as a class apart, marked out by their intellectual aspirations, communion with nude bodies and strange habits of working at night. A gothic print of the studio of Baccio Bandinelli – established in Leonardo’s former digs at the Vatican – is the first known ...”

“... particularly as an agent of upward mobility. Back on the ‘mainland’, Viktor Samsonov, of lower-class provincial origin, had been on the upward path, sent after seven years of primary education to study surveying at Petrozavodsk Industrial Technical School, when in 1937 he was arrested as an 18-year-old student along with other Komsomol activists. He ...”

“... he’ll willingly go. He’s a detective of the Raymond Chandler type, with a touch of Bogart’s class – he once had a fling with Daphne Airmont, heiress to the Airmont cheese fortune. He’s wisecracking, fast-talking, like everyone in this place. Here he is with April Randazzo, nightclub crooner, a few dances in: ‘Oh my! Is that for me?’ April ...”

“... with a series of creeds – evangelical fundamentalism, Randian libertarianism, chattering-class liberalism – and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism in 2019. It is an obvious, if nebulous, manifesto for a presidential run. His publishers assure us that he wrote it himself.Communion is a bad book. It is sloppy, unfocused, stylistically ...”

“... that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating ...”

“... eye. This is a quality societies have always prized: how else can soldiers be persuaded to go to war? To avoid the opprobrium that would result from killing their opponent, some duellists would point their pistols in the air. Achieving ‘a definite result’, the Marquis of Dorchester observed in 1660, was hardly important beside the aim of demonstrating ...”

“... In ‘The Indian Uprising’, a story Barthelme described as a ‘response’ to the Vietnam War, a wise woman observes that ‘young people … run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society.’ The narrator visits her for advice after trying to ‘defend the city’ from invaders by constructing a barricade out of ...”

“... standing trial. How somebody as worldly and bright as Wilde, so alert to the laws of the ruling class and at the receiving end of so much advice and so vulnerable to blackmail and so broke, could have been led so easily towards his downfall remains a mystery. But there are crucial aspects of his make-up and background, especially in the quality of his ...”

“... pique at not being given a bigger role at party conference and broke with Starmer over Israel’s war in Gaza. But the more obvious relationship is of kinship: Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of ...”

“... that figure is struggling to contain. He lost his father, his mother, his childhood really. The war took from him his friends, his idealism, a good proportion of his self-belief. And yet, he kept on going. His letters show a man of loyalty, generosity and lovely manners6 (though not much irony or sense of the ridiculous, and he does complain a lot about ...”

“... and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in. Despite the creation of a small millionaire class, 45 per cent of its inhabitants are below the poverty level (unable to meet basic needs). Around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day. Most of Kosovo’s poor are supported by networks of extended family and clan, more ...”

“... could not have been satisfied in Iceland even if he’d been made of money. He liked working-class women, preferably barmaids of fairly mature years, and he did not want them for normal sex, from which he had a chilly aversion. He wanted buggery only, and only with partners who also wanted it exclusively. Preliminary enquiries, you’d have thought, must ...”

“... Defeated Communards were executed at the cemetery wall of Père-Lachaise in the heart of working-class eastern Paris – the Mur des Fédérés, as it would be called, soon became a shrine of the Left. The question of whether or not a state funeral would stop at Notre-Dame was critical because religion was so divisive. And even when there wasn’t a quarrel ...”