“... gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two rival associations, the Free Society of Artists and the Society of Artists of Great Britain, displayed larger numbers of women. (Both groups allowed submissions in non-traditional media: needle-paintings, shellworks, waxworks and ...”

“... encourage opposition to one-party rule, while the RPF continued to mount attacks from territory it held inside Rwanda and along the Ugandan border. The Government began to build up its military strength – the size of the Army increased from four thousand to fifty thousand in the space of a few months – and local militias were created. The Tutsi inside ...”

“... two other biographies in English already exist: Iain Hamilton’s Koestler: A Biography (1982) and David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). But Scammell has little time for either work. His bibliography dismisses Hamilton’s book as ‘superficial and ill-researched’, and Cesarani’s (the one which attacked Koestler as a serial ...”

“... shrieked and the doors of the Toyota flew open. Bodyguards leapt out, their submachine-guns held up in the air, and ran with the limousine down into the underground car-park. Thirty seconds of drama on the other side of the street. Another thirty seconds and the traffic was flowing normally. The lights changed to red and the old cigarette-seller on the ...”

“... but a nagging concern with legalities and technicalities: can someone non compos mentis be held liable for a crime, be responsible for committing suicide or lawfully hold property or make a will? The Prerogativa Regis considers what was to be done if, for example, a feudal tenant ‘happen to fail of his wit’. (Answer: the King had not only to ...”

“... inner cities (London included) and industrial and ex-industrial towns in England, where its vote held up reasonably well; of ethnic communities, which is one reason its vote held up in these places; and of Scotland and (still) Wales. The Conservative Party is the party of the south, the suburbs, the suburbanised ...”

“... radio, time-saving and sometimes life-saving conveniences which he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an ...”

“... a few assigned them to various forgers; but others, notably John Benton and D.W. Robertson, held their sole author to be Abelard, who they said had channelled or even invented the passionate, unrepentant Heloise to point up his success in converting her. As the later epistles demonstrate, she was indeed converted, or at any rate agreed to ‘set the ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”

“... lives he might have led, as a debtor like his father, or as a clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... much and no more than the weight of evidence adduced in support of them. So with relief we turn to David Bell’s collection of essays by ten academics and the secretary of the Fabian Society, most of whom have had a good deal of varied practical experience at home or abroad. Their names may not be household words even in Labour circles, but without exception ...”

“... and by too many black immigrants. The Brixton and Toxteth riots of the summer of 1981 are held to justify the prominence of the law-and-order issue in Mrs Thatcher’s victorious election campaign two years earlier. As the Daily Express (6 July 1981) declared: ‘People are bound to ask what is happening to our country ... Having been one of the most ...”