“... than the appearance it presents on the table,’ she concedes that since ‘dine we must ... we may as well dine elegantly.’ She is not backward with advice about purely ornamental pastries and jellies, and shows a certain nostalgia for the fabulous desserts of Georgian times: ‘if there be any poetry at all in meals, or the process of feeding, there is ...”

“... imply that a writer’s first novel began to be worked on more or less from the time he was born may seem a very ordinary idea indeed. However that may be, I can’t go back so far, and only feel inclined to because the exercise might illuminate what I have to say later. The cinema was not the only influence in those early ...”

“... we come to this novel hoping to spend time with someone usually so mercurial and interesting, we may be aghast to find him taking himself so seriously. We look for the angle, but there is none. We expect the novel to crack up, to corpse, but it keeps a dismayingly straight face. Puzzlement may then turn to ...”

“... taken to give force to the slogan, it redefined the procedure for registering cases. From 1 May this year, in order to ‘protect people’s rights to sue’, cases can no longer be rejected by the registration office except on technical grounds to do with documentation. As a result the number of cases allowed to go to trial jumped by almost a third: a ...”

“... proposal you might hear in another country, even as a joke. Emigration split families, and this may have made the need to gather together stronger for those who remained, even after death. In a country of the dispossessed, it is also tempting to see the grave plot as a treasured piece of land. But the drama of the Irish graveyard was not about ...”

“... issues. They agree that US quasi-imperial supremacy is a ‘bubble’, a semblance that may have overawed the globe during a period of disoriented transition, but never derived from American military or economic power alone. It depended on the absence or indifference of the US’s earlier foes, Russia and China, plus the collusion of its former ...”

“... camera in ways that unsettle the illusion, their gaze breaking out of the world of the film. We may wonder whether the actor is looking at us in the audience or responding to the filmmaker behind the camera; sometimes, the gaze is followed by a dream or memory sequence, or by some other sort of scene from elsewhere in time and space. In the ...”

“... minister set the stage for the emergence of Beppe Grillo and Five Star in the local elections of May 2012. In France as the fiscal compact began to bite, François Hollande’s presidency was dead almost before it had started.Amid all these events, Germany can easily seem like a bastion of stability, with ‘Merkel über alles’ its anthem. But beneath the ...”

“... outlay of coupons. A pair of women’s shoes required five coupons – men’s needed seven. This may have been an echo of an old system of pricing shoes: by the size of the foot and the amount of leather. But it may also have given men’s styles more cachet. The Peal brogue is a woman’s version of a man’s shoe, and ...”

“... developing the US’s new maritime strategy, aimed at restricting Soviet freedom of movement. In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly ...”

“... are all possibilities. The only known reader of the new work is Salinger’s son, Matthew, but he may have been joined by Salinger’s widow, Colleen, and possibly by his literary agent and by a few editors at Little, Brown, the publisher of the original four books. Or maybe not; maybe at this stage it stops with the widow and the son, or even just the ...”

“... a novel. Indeed, sometimes he seems to think of each individual volume as a separate novel, which may give us a clue. As for autobiography, he does use real names, which is part of the uproar over this volume. He is accused not only of involving real people in his own personal story but of revealing potentially embarrassing personal facts about them as ...”

“... Augustine considers the plight of a judge. A judge in attempting to discover the truth of a crime may put a man to torture. What if the man dies under torture; or, unable to bear the pain, confesses to the crime though he is innocent? And what of his accusers? They may sincerely have wished to bring criminals to ...”

“... a two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush. In the early 20th century, Jane Martinson writes in You May Never See Us Again, identical twins tended to be ‘treated almost as a single entity’. David and Frederick would often dress in matching clothes, a habit they retained for most of their lives. Surviving stories from their early years seem cherry-picked to ...”

“... to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview broadcast by the BBC on 23 May 1964 to define his wife’s ‘genius’ or ‘special attributes’. ‘Normally,’ he responded,she was extremely happy and enjoyed all the usual things of life, but every now and then in conversation, for instance, she would do what I call leave the ...”