“... episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to care too much,’ she noted in her diary, ‘even for a garden!’ Wharton’s zeal for home-making had little to do with her feelings for her husband. Long before ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... base except the archetypal white male rock critic. In mini hatchet jobs for the Village Voice, Robert Christgau declared war on ‘the enemy’. He situated Abba in the tradition of the advertising jingle and sniped that their ‘disinclination to sing like Negroes reassures the Europopuli’. The Anglo-American pop-rock canon had by then established ...”

“... up the cost of everything, and diverts money from honest citizens, including the recipients of winter fuel payments, who go cold and hungry as a result. No doubt there are more extreme, exotic or intellectualised forms of ethno-nationalism on social media, built on grander conspiracy theories, but Reform doesn’t need them. A folk wisdom that gestures ...”

“... pushing energy prices so high that they would spark what one Treasury official called a ‘nuclear winter recession’. Despite opposition from the White House, two senators – Mark Kirk, a Republican, and Robert Menendez, a Democrat (currently serving a federal prison sentence on corruption charges) – demanded sanctions ...”