“... Syrie stayed in London, where she was taking a profitable interest in interior design (a reliable mark of bad character in her husband’s later books). They were divorced in 1929: ‘Glad to be rid of her at last,’ Meyers writes, ‘Maugham threw in the chauffeur with the Rolls.’ There were further travels, further books. The world-famous Maugham persona ...”

“... didn’t work for him, and so wouldn’t be covered; researchers and secretaries, like the woman Mark Garnier sent to the sex shop, work for individual MPs, not for Parliament: if they have a complaint, the Equality Act stipulates that it has to be taken up first with their employer, who’s quite possibly the culprit, before they can appeal to an employment ...”

“... Whitechapel devised methods of finding their way around. They placed bricks along the pavements to mark their routes through the maze of alleys and back streets around Brick Lane. They created codes for identifying the buses to the West End: the No. 8 was ‘two eggs’, the No. 22 ‘two hooks’. Solidarity was crucial: these Bengalis had all ducked the ...”

“... the camp at some point in the summer of 1940: the diligent Mary Felstiner; Foenkinos; Jacqueline Rose in Women in Dark Times (2014); Belinfante in her essay for the Taschen selection; Griselda Pollock in her momentous new study, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. There is no official trace of Salomon or anyone else detained at the time: the camp ...”

“... occupants as simply a provision for his own support & enjoyment!’ The facetious exclamation mark doesn’t even begin to disguise his anxiety about what was going on back home in his presently fatherless family.Only after all these issues have been addressed in detail does Peter get around to what is chiefly on his mind:If, for a time, we stand still or ...”

“... approach of A.S. Neill. The outcome was less than happy. He tried to abolish the strap. Parents rose up in arms at ‘classroom chaos’ and ‘lack of educational progress’. A great many pupils demonstrated in his favour. An enquiry was held: Mackenzie was suspended, and retired before his time. My teacher relatives in Aberdeen used to speak of him ...”

“... costs would fall as the health of the population improved, was shown to be untrue. Instead, costs rose progressively as more conditions became treatable, as expectation of life increased, as methods of treatment became more expensive, as pay was increased and as more staff were employed. The change in the relation between patient and doctor began in the ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was extraordinary ...”

“... he is allegedly explaining modern art. At the other end of the scale, realist works range from Mark Wallinger’s hyper-realist racehorse pictures and Richard Patterson’s monumental painting of a tiny plastic model of a minotaur through to the ‘bad’ and faux-naif portraiture of Martin Maloney and James Rielly. Other painters adapt traditional Realist ...”

“... appropriate for royalty. Left to her own devices she liked a prawn cocktail, convinced that Marie Rose sauce was a ‘far more exotic mix’ than ketchup and mayonnaise.Over the decades the princess and her lady in waiting became an effective double act. They made a striking couple: at nearly six foot tall, Glenconner towered over Margaret’s ...”

“... population had lost its connection to land and a feeling for what it could do. Nobody quoted Mark Twain: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it any more.’ Nobody explained, as Christophers does here, that land is an ideal vehicle for the storage and distribution of value: finite but also ubiquitous, fungible on a global scale, the favoured form of ...”

“... the Ottoman Empire and consolidate their own state through European intervention – was fulfilled.Mark Mazower opens his history of the Greek Revolution with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. As Gramsci wrote of Croce, there is a politics of start dates. By choosing 1815, Mazower signals that he wants to incorporate the revolution in a wider story about ...”

“... be ‘improper to leave them out in any modern play’. They were generally believed honest, one mark of which may have been that, as Beattie calculates, between 1770 and 1790, of prosecutions where the runners gave evidence 79 per cent ended in a guilty verdict; the figure fell to 59 per cent where they did not. Fielding would have liked to run a force ...”

“... the early evening, we found that familiar markers had vanished. Novelty towers in striking colours rose above the remnants of dirty industries. The old detour that once carried hikers across the lethal swirl of the Bow flyover has been replaced by a shivering pontoon walkway, on the fence of which somebody has sprayed the obvious response: ever changing ...”

“... political movement to implement that critique). By these means he learned to see. Like Naipaul, he rose above the prison of his origins to imagine an India that was hygienic, cleansed and reformed. To make this point more dramatic, Naipaul summons up a contrasting figure: a man who left India and yet saw nothing. This is in order once more to support his ...”