“... In 1981, the last time a Zweig revival was plotted, it failed; this time, with Pushkin Press’s nice paper and pretty formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell,* it seems to be succeeding – John Fowles (a representatively Anglo-Saxon e and u crossbreed) wrote: ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse ...”

“... body is agile and youthful. I’ve seen her naked, and it’s all natural.’ It would be nice to know exactly how many people in the audience were thinking: ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ In any case: ‘She looks better with her clothes off than on . . . The little woman is perfect, vertically and horizontally.’ The party cost ...”

“... a yawn.’ More equality is a good thing and it’s an idea that’s worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit. That may be wishful thinking. But so too is the idea of an evidence-based politics, which just opens the door to all the prevarications of joined-up ...”

“... man who rammed his car into her, weaponising his vehicle just as jihadists have done in London and Nice and Barcelona. A helicopter surveilling the event crashed, killing the two officers inside. Dozens were injured. The ‘Unite the Right’ protest was a reminder that the dream of the Confederacy has never died: the vision of Herrenvolk democracy has ...”

“... Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests? Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David ...”

“... nothing coming out of your mouth, and everybody’s going around: “Hello, how are you, what a nice day” … and you’re dying.’ Someone screams – a woman: someone else, or rather pretty much everyone else, covers their ears. Or as Monroe put it in one of the fragments of her 1951 notebook, ‘Actress must have no mouth.’ Actress must be dumb ...”

“... heart. He learns that you must go beyond the text into history, without expecting to find anything nice at the end of it all. Doctor Criminale’s very topical message is that Europe is a more dangerous place than the innocent English imagine: ‘an ugly twisted growth, hung about with deceits, obscurities and betrayals’. (The blurb informs us that Bradbury ...”

“... from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with Thistlewood … they brought the Cato-street affair to maturity, just to answer their purposes for striking terror into the minds of the people on the eve of a ...”

“... to raise money for the Nijinsky Foundation. This time the Times reviewer compared his work to Richard Dadd’s. When a new, unexpurgated version of the diary appeared in 1999 it became clear that Romola had reordered things and edited the journal in ways that subtly changed its overall character, making it less tedious, masturbation-fixated and ...”

“... by love and sympathy, he says:Her immediate ‘face’ when she meets someone is too open & too nice – ‘smarmy’ as you said – but that’s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stricken. Or perhaps – and I think this is more like it – her poise & brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity – only this ...”

“... in an interview, Hoover’s niece said she’d heard ‘Uncle Edgar wasn’t very nice to his father when he was ill. He was ashamed of him. He couldn’t tolerate the fact that granddaddy had mental illness. He never could tolerate anything that was imperfect.’ But he worshipped his mother, who appears in other books as a martinet, and here ...”

“... found his métier. ‘It was pretty hard to heckle Ron, because he is so obviously such a damned nice guy,’ one of his colleagues said. He also seemed well informed, even though he carried his knowledge lightly. ‘All of Reagan’s reading of Reader’s Digest and other publications seemed to have paid off,’ Boot observes. ‘The run of the mill actor ...”

“... in the technologies that now capture the lives of animals with unprecedented intimacy. It would be nice to think that we are becoming wiser and more curious about other forms of life. But our curiosity often seems merely to serve human needs. It hardly needs to be said that all is not well with our world. We are disempowered, isolated and (quite ...”

“... friend, Melville said, is someone you can call in the middle of the night to ‘tell him, “Be nice, find your revolver and come immediately,” and to hear him respond, “OK, I’m coming.” Who does that for anyone?’) The casual style of Bob le flambeur looks forward to the Nouvelle Vague, rather than to the pared-down, meticulous thrillers Melville ...”

“... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...”