“... Victorian invention of the lobby correspondent, a role filled by men like William White or Henry Lucy, brought parliamentary debates alive for the newspaper reader. The correspondents usually did this by dwelling on the MPs’ individuality: their mannerisms, their dress, their hobby-horses. This humanised the institution and undermined radical stereotypes ...”

“... to perfect her language skills. Her novels, Dillon points out, are full of hypochondriacs: Lucy Snowe in Villette, for example, is subject to ‘an overheated and discursive imagination’. In Brontë’s work the boundaries of the term are explored; the ‘hypochondria’ from which Jane Eyre suffers on the eve of her wedding is a crawling (and ...”

“... to popular radio shows like Fibber McGee and Molly or Burns and Allen, when they watched I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show, when they went to Red Sox baseball games and outdoor concerts by the Boston Pops, they were participating in a collective culture that did not acknowledge – either with interest or dislike – their difference. There was an ...”

“... other letters at the time and her dramatisation of a similar event in Villette, where Lucy Snowe explains her actions by saying ‘I had a pressure of affliction on my mind.’ Harman goes on to speculate about the nature of her confession, presuming that (and she doesn’t tell us so much as lead us up to the conclusion) it concerned ‘the ...”

“... promise of redemptive violence. Some have applied similar thinking to today’s far right: Wendy Brown identified ‘apocalyptic populists’ as a key component of Trump’s voter base in 2016, and her more recent work examines the mood of nihilism pervading contemporary political life.†For Seymour, the key emotion of our time is resentment, fuelled by the ...”

“... a gallon. We had it all teed up.”’ This brings to mind an image drawn from another sport: Lucy endlessly lining up the football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment and send him flying. Obama did the opposite of that. He went out of his way to ensure the ball was where it needed to ...”