“... other, grandly plotted fictions embedded in the kind of wide historical novelscapes constructed by Walter Scott and Stendhal. Neither project was tremendously successful; there is nothing in the collection to disturb the conventional wisdom that Pushkin was a poet of genius who also wrote good prose. If Tales of Belkin gleam with possibility and the beginnings ...”

“... simplicity and euphony’ after growing embarrassed by his youthful attempts to write like Walter Pater. Writing for the theatre also taught him ‘the value of succinctness’: in his novels and stories, he gave up on brocaded descriptions and concentrated on dialogue, narrative development and manipulating the reader’s expectations. But his ...”

“... was suspicious, but the Huxleys pulled more strings until the marriage was allowed to happen. Walter Bedford thereafter ‘melted back into his existence’ and seems never to have been heard of again.As a child, Bedford spent a lot of time on long train journeys, ‘bundled to and fro’ (a phrase from A Legacy) between Berlin, Baden and sometimes ...”

“... on the highway, something had to happen.’ After hurried consultations with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and legal checks to ascertain her constitutional right to act, she announced that Germany’s ‘fundamental right to asylum’ had ‘no upper limit’ and urged her fellow Germans to welcome the needy of the 21st century. ‘We will manage ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... great bugbear), but I agree that Dewey kept Emersonian romance alive in a period when people like Walter Lippmann, and lots of technocratic New Deal bureaucrats, were pooh-poohing it in the name of ‘practical politics’. Westbrook makes a good case for saying that Dewey was ‘a liberal steadily radicalised by his distinctive faith in thoroughgoing ...”

“... Dr Beko Ransome-Kuti, a human rights activist, and four journalists: Chris Anyanwu, Kunle Ajibade, George Mbah and Ben Charles Obi. Dr Ransome-Kuti, the brother of Fela Kuti and, like him, one of the few honest voices in the country, was charged with faxing ‘sensitive documents pertaining to the coup trials ... to his collaborators in the UK and the US in ...”

“... exploring its symbolic and mythical dimensions, from the best-selling fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and ...”

“... everyday perception and technical innovation. Brushing burrs from his trousers and dog one day, George Mestral was intrigued by their mechanism. Later he invented Velcro, the non-zip fastener. Excellence works in the everyday world, diversifying consumer life-styles as it goes. It is in this appeal to the lay imagination that management thinking has found ...”

“... thousand distinguished fashionables’. On 12 April, she was received at Carlton Palace by King George IV, who, it was reported, ‘expressed great pleasure at her appearance’. So many people came to see Crachami that she was soon exhausted. In fact, she may have died of exhaustion, though it was more probably TB. On Thursday, 3 June, she received more ...”

“... happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between both of them and Margaret Thatcher’s Tories, who came to power after Wilson withdrew his party’s ...”

“... which reached him and went down well. The first came when he and his wife Jane went to stay with George Barker, in Italy I think, and Barker exclaimed afterwards: ‘That boy! He’s got a tiger in his loins!’ Karl loved that. Who wouldn’t? His friends all got to hear about it. He laughed about it in a deprecating way but inside I think he felt that ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her ...”

“... long and convoluted. The notion of the Lost Cause had its origin in the antebellum South, where Walter Scott’s novels were in every literate household. Jefferson Davis, the wartime president of the Confederate states, made a pilgrimage to Culloden four years after their defeat. Such thinking blossomed in the next decades, when in the imagination of its ...”

“... or others, of having belonged to. Members would be, for instance, all the casualties of what George Dangerfield long ago called the strange death of liberal England; all the Irish people who hoped for a non-violent progression to independence; and in the club’s most capacious definition, all the inheritors of the Enlightenment, in Europe and across the ...”