“... studies – even the best-known of them, on The Historical Novel, written in Moscow in the grim winter of 1936-7 – invariably relate the Marxist scheme to the crude story-content of fiction: ‘Novels are approved because their content is approved and the content is the more approved the more it portrays the larger conflicts of society,’ Richard ...”

“... curve, migrating                     mouse-quivering water, mountain-driven winter water, in the high       tweed, stripping of fits mountains to run faster in its skin ... ‘Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman’ applies the same descriptive and mimetic skills to a bulldozer, an electric knife strop and ‘the space ...”

“... and emotionally immersed in the care and upbringing of his children. For example, in the winter of 1867 his eldest child, 15-year-old Tom, was ill yet again: ‘His coughing generally wakes me though he is in the next room, and if I hear him moaning I know that the pain in his side, which the cough brings on, is troublesome, and then I generally go ...”

“... Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it (Cookson didn’t pull it off, not least because ...”

“... in the system. Minor blockages – like the social care problems which delayed discharges over the winter of 2016 – cause significant build-up. Even before austerity, in the wake of the swine flu epidemic a decade ago, it was clear that the NHS risked being overwhelmed in a ‘surge’. Hancock took no action on ventilators before 15 March, when he pleaded ...”

“... has been no total war between major powers since 1945. The most prominent exponent of this view, Robert Jervis of Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued that such wars can no longer occur if statesmen are rational. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are ...”

“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

“... should be together for ever. ‘You will find happiness,’ he told her. They were at lunch. The winter held days of sunshine, noons of infinite calm. He broke a piece of bread to cover his confusion, dismayed at the tense of his verb. ‘Do you think so?’ she said coolly. Nothing escaped her. The lover, like the reader, notices everything. Last ...”

“... may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative furniture were often arranged, or rearranged. And Robb’s stories are, after ...”

“... have been better reflected in another abstract perfume, Chanel No. 19, invented for her by Henri Robert in December 1970, the month before she died. It was named for her birthday, 19 August. Tania Sanchez describes it as ‘a striking and admirably dissonant portrait’ of the 87-year-old Chanel, ‘from the silvery hiss of its nail-polish-remover beginnings ...”

“... contains an exemplary thumbnail history of 1848, a flawless account of the Siege of Paris in the winter of 1870 and a dead-eyed résumé of the Commune the following year. During the siege, Sante reminds us, hunger drove Parisians to extremes: mouse pâté with fur in the mix; cats and rats; ‘dog-liver brochettes’. Eventually the specimens in the Jardin ...”

“... dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little about. Pope John Paul II was pretty much like that ...”

“... as Transhumance refers to the nomadic shepherd’s practice of moving flocks between summer and winter pastures and encloses the ideas of the human and of the earth (humus). ‘So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the ...”

“... add to love new heat,As princes do in time of action getNew taxes, and remit them not in peace,No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.The analogy is strange, even by Donne’s standards. Instead of natural abundance, we get unjust tax policy, spring’s increase weirdly converted to a financial burden. The couple were, in fact, deeply in ...”