“... frontiers of citizenship.This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that ordinary cathedral lay clerks were generally not well educated, and cathedral organists in the 19th century were not university men. Peppin goes on: ‘Music still had no recognised place in any public-school curriculum. And should teenage boys be singing at all? Victorian ...”

“... his safety pin tried various tricks, sometimes cruel, to produce a reaction. In The Conspirators, Paul Henreid managed to get her to look flustered by telling her ‘that with the lights behind her I could see right through her negligée’. The director of The Strange Woman rapped her on the ankles and the knuckles with a baton. Barton suggests that her ...”

“... O’Rowe, which first aired in 2020. One of the reasons the TV series bettered the novel, I think (Paul Mescal aside, come on), was that the ending was more realistic. In the final episode Marianne tells Connell, who is considering studying in New York, that they’ll be all right. In the novel, she says she’ll ‘always be here’. There is some ambiguity ...”

“... of the postwar Italian culture over which the PCI, directly or indirectly, presided. But behind it lay much older traditions that accorded pre-eminence to the realm of ideas, conceived as will or understanding, in politics. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the completion of the Risorgimento, Italy never knew a peninsular state or aristocracy, and most ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... make little sense because he doesn’t give us so much as a hint of the coercive menace that lay behind them. For instance, he describes the Blair government’s response to the fuel blockade in 2000 as a victory for his principled position that ‘whatever we did had to be justifiable on wider policy grounds.’ He makes no mention of Blair’s threat ...”

“... men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. Himes had already seen his share of troubles but, as Lawrence Jackson writes ...”

“... it was uttered, and so never reach the person called.’ Or: ‘The lady’s smoothly shaved legs lay side by side like two similarly clad sisters, both in silk sheaths.’ Or: the waiters ‘moved about like gardeners; when they poured coffee and milk into the cups, it was as if they were watering white flower-beds. Trees and kiosks stood on the ...”

“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... Guardian (21 June) about the latest eruption in the Observer’s boardroom, Lonrho’s spokesman, Paul Spicer, was not concerned to confirm or deny the accuracy of the report: his only response was to warn that a search would be made to discover which of the directors had leaked the information and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of ...”

“... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...”

“... method?Her American followers didn’t appreciate that the roots of many of Montessori’s ideas lay in her religion. On Christmas Day 1939, she gave a speech in which she announced that ‘the fallen adult must look to the child for salvation.’ In Barcelona, her method was adopted as a Catholic system of education, championed by Father Antonio Casulleras ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... from the Surrealists, especially since this novel takes place in a Paris that is decidedly Paul Eluard’s capitale de la douleur. And, at this stage, Stead is omnivorously assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language ...”

“... possess nothing more than a veneer of civilisation – one has only to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath,’ and the best solution would be a universal bloodbath, after which the oppressors will find it is a bit late to be sorry ‘they left the hordes in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today.’ Sardism gave way to ...”