“... She said that from the time she was five years old to the time she was 12, her father regularly took her from her bed in the middle of the night and carried her out to his barn. There would be many men there, and some women; they all wore gowns and hats ‘resembling a Viking hat with horns’. There would be blood every-where, and pitchforks in the ...”

“... person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all the author’s evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also ...”

“... gave them debentures worth £3000, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. At one point, he took an ailing Vivienne alone on holiday to Torquay and then, called back to London after five days, paid Eliot’s train fare and hotel expenses so that she wouldn’t want for company. And while Russell was still in Torquay, he received yet another letter of ...”

“... with Cameron’s description of this as a ‘slight fall’. After the letters were published, John McDonnell hailed the prime minister as a convert to the anti-austerity cause. The unedifying spectacle of a prime minister ignorant of the impact of his own government’s policies, or so taken in by his ministers’ rhetoric that he could not reconcile ...”

“... we shall see, involved first falling more deeply asleep. Work on this project stopped in 1929. He took it up again when he returned to Paris, a refugee, in 1934. The notecards multiplied, new dossiers were started, prospectuses for a book now grandly entitled ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ were sent to friends. Baudelaire loomed larger in ...”

“... like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.But when the younger Bush took office he appointed foreign policy advisers who took a less sanguine view of America’s situation in the world. Bush’s war cabinet and its support staff saw nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace ...”

“... around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was barely noticed amid the British MAGA wannabes eagerly partaking of the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. Simion himself paid tribute to Kirk in his brief speech. He marched onto the temporary stage on Whitehall wearing a ...”

“... individual class membership, but rather to explain why collective action and social conflict took the forms they did. Next, however, there has been a frontal attack on his use of class as the key factor for understanding social conflict. Dahrendorf and others have argued that class, being based on property, is less fundamental than power for the ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... good goal ruled out for offside). His successes within Portugal were not just luck, however: he took a poor team and turned them within a matter of months into the dominant force in Portuguese football, bringing in new players, changing the side’s tactics and insisting on discipline. He revealed himself to be ruthless, shrewd and highly ...”

“... When Alexander saw him, fat and huge and coarse-faced (for he was dark in colour, too), he took an instant dislike to him, hating him both for the way he had plotted and the way he looked. He ordered them to thread his feet with a bronze bit and drag him around in a circle, naked. Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the ...”

“... with respect to the British Bomb was closely held. The key players were Churchill, Lindemann and John Anderson, a senior minister in the war cabinet. They were in turn dependent on the experts’ constantly changing, often conflicting views as to whether an atomic bomb was possible and, if so, what it would do and how it might be used, how much it would ...”

“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style of ...”

“... who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre (Jane ended up with St John Rivers), to the larger-than-life adoptive mother who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre? Then there’s the rhetorical preening of Winterson’s last paragraph, which affects to pass her mother the microphone. If this ...”

“... in the distance.’ But how else, Hardy said, laughing, could he have written it? (Lawrence, who took so much from Hardy, has ‘the dawn is wanly blueing’ in Sea and Sardinia.) It is one of the signal pleasures of Claire Tomalin’s superb new biography that she has an eye for this kind of thing in Hardy, and quotes so well from him. We know a good critic ...”