“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he adopted his pseudonym in 1989, at the dawn of the country’s short-lived perestroika – he rose through the ranks of the army. Before leaving Algeria in 2000, he fought against the Islamists for eight years, and even helped lay two ambushes intended for his cadet school classmate Said Mekhloufi, by then an Islamist militant. (Mekhloufi was eventually ...”

“... wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made sanctions again seem a better alternative and their use rose dramatically. They have also grown more powerful, focusing on what Edward Fishman in his new study describes as one of the key ‘chokepoints’ in the world economy: control of the US dollar. Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... argument, we need to turn to his account of what he calls positive liberty. Berlin’s attempt to mark off this separate concept is admittedly dogged by several false starts. He begins by suggesting that, whereas negative liberty is freedom from constraint, positive liberty is freedom to follow a certain form of life. But this distinction cannot be used to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was taken on a widely publicised tour of ‘forty universities and 43 cocktail parties’. He also rose to prominence in the world of cinema, both as the screenwriter of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad – in which a glamorously distressed couple talk endlessly about whether or not they met the year before in a deserted hotel – and as the director ...”

“... who had been heavily pregnant at William’s funeral – had given her baby the middle name Rose. She had placed a rose in William’s coffin. Christine gave me a copy of what she called ‘William’s story’, written on seven A4 sheets of paper in an erratic mix of capital and lower-case letters.Christine is dead ...”

“... them in 1948 and had done nothing to help them since. The Palestinian national movement, which rose to prominence under Yasir Arafat’s leadership in the late 1960s, was defined in large part by its belief that Palestinians had to rely on themselves. Mahmoud Darwish was not the only one to note that during the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded ...”

“... something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning her own deuxième carrière as a narratologist, describes narratology as ‘immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the price of becoming a separate theoretical ...”

“... on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre ...”