“... has produced it. In this respect, Howells lies open to extreme misunderstanding. The narrow middle-class ‘selfishness’ of merely familial affection is liable to be shrunk and chilled by the sweeping Tolstoyan perspective of full human possibility, one he needs to be felt as consciously holding back from. Likewise the Kentons’s provinciality may arouse ...”

“... of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was reinstated on condition that he took a special test every three years. He managed to ...”

“... of honeybees, known as colony collapse disorder, is not global warming but a widely used class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids that mimic the effects of nicotine and act as nerve poisons. Honeybees pollinate about a third of the world’s crops, and their disappearance would eliminate foods such as cucumbers, berries, almonds and avocados from ...”

“... the name of the town in which the Karamazovs live?’ was the sort of question he liked to ask his class, rather than anything more existential. When Mason wanted to write about Joyce and the ideas of the philosopher Giambattista Vico, which might seem a perfectly good idea given Joyce’s professed interest in him, Ellmann dismissed it out of hand: ‘all ...”

“... with relish and approval is the one he heard Coleridge give in the winter of 1798 – an anti-war oration by a poet who would eventually choose not to join the Unitarians after all. Any final inference about Hazlitt and Dissent ought to be complex. His turn from the faith was not a defection, and one only stands back, a little, at Paulin’s decision to ...”

“... venture on ‘Art’. Amis is listed by Hugh Kenner as an example of the post-(Second-World-) War trough in the English arts, a case of ‘anarchic energies ... there to draw applause’. Amis doesn’t always, of course, draw applause-there are English readers too who reckon him a philistine, and who neither like nor admire the books; and he clearly ...”

“... and then (after she cuts their meetings short) with a pretty, dark-haired young woman in his class called Melanie, whom he nicknames Meláni, ‘the dark one’. Lurie is described as having sex with Melanie some three or four times, during which she remains inert, barely co-operative. Shortly afterwards, she charges him with harassment. Hauled up before ...”

“... word. What about that? That’s what it means to die an honourable warrior, on your shield, your war-cry on your lips!’ It was Uncle Vasily who took the little Pushkin, in 1811, to his admission interview at the new lycée at Tsarskoe Selo, fifteen miles south of Petersburg, where the boy would make several enduring friendships, and where he wrote 29 ...”

“... nor does standard scene-setting. The siblings attend a school where a teacher can be bullied in class by oblique references to her son, who has been arrested on suspicion of killing farm animals (including a lamb that Rosa watched learning to walk), something that strongly suggests a rural community, but no attempt is made to describe or evoke the ...”

“... You were ill, but you might not feel it yet. Might not know it yet, except you did. ‘A new class of lifetime pariahs’, Susan Sontag called them in Aids and Its Metaphors: ‘the future ill’. The artist and film-maker Derek Jarman remembered his HIV diagnosis, in 1986: I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into ...”

“... formally charged with murder, and the trial, which finally began on 16 January 2009, a propaganda war raged between those who sided with the prosecution and Knox’s supporters – the ‘innocentisti’ and the ‘colpevolisti’, as they were soon termed. The report prepared by Judge Matteini for the pretrial was leaked to the Italian press, which gleefully ...”

“... had a brief and stormy career, in Paris, in the years around the outbreak of the First World War. His chief influences were Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry and the Italian Futurists; he preceded by a few years the Dadaists and Surrealists, who acclaimed him a pioneering figure. He was, André Breton said, a ‘barometer’ of the avant-garde. As a heavyweight ...”

“... for the delicatessen’ and selling brooms door to door.After a spell in the Navy during the war, he enrolled in Kenyon College where he found it hard to keep up with the work (although he broke ‘the school’s beer-chugalug record’). A classmate told Stern that even in the hard drinking culture of the school, Newman was famous, and would ‘run ...”

“... Dray makes the point in a closely-argued piece on conflicting interpretations of the English Civil War. Historians come up with all manner of methodical checks and contrivances to give their narratives some semblance of objective truth. In fact, these refinements of method are always embedded in a larger sense of what properly counts as convincing historical ...”

“... is now a parking lot. The 1980s were a tumultuous time. Saudi Shia suffered badly in the tug of war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Countless numbers were arrested and tortured; many more fled or disappeared. The crackdown left a permanent scar. Shia were required to be loyal citizens without being treated as such. They began to feel the effects of ...”