“... not wishing to cause embarrassment or ill-feeling, destroyed letters in which Austen wrote too freely or satirically about other family members. But for the reader of Austen’s fiction, hungry for a sense of the author’s inner life, Cassandra’s depredations can only seem like older-sister arrogance of the most mortifying sort: a jealous winnowing down ...”

“... of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by John Woods. The failings are apparently mostly lexical and syntactical: ‘Knopf have once again employed a translator whose knowledge of German appears inadequate to the task, and who is capable of careless errors.’ Of course it’s good to get things ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... 1987 to 1989, Chadian factions backed by Libya used Darfur as a rear base, provisioning themselves freely from the crops and cattle of local villagers. On at least one occasion they provoked a joint Chadian-French armed incursion into pursuing them. Many of the guns in Darfur came from those factions. Gaddafi’s formula for war was expansive: he collected ...”

“... raw carrots and brown rice, or people raised in the Church of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in ...”

“... original, face-to-face version.) There is, of course, no money in Belgium; Hans spends the loan freely in town, and never mentions repayment. His behaviour alarms the ‘French’ Krulls. He lies casually, and confesses those lies just as casually; he also forged that letter of introduction from his father, who died 15 years previously. But, worse than all ...”

“... particularly if he is being hunted and his life is in danger, should enjoy the right to move freely, to cross borders, to choose the destination of his exile.’For the next two years, Kaminsky forged documents for the Haganah and its rivals in the Stern Gang, a terrorist militia led by Yitzhak Shamir, whose members included one of Kaminsky’s ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...”

“... said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely the more spacious Conservative air’.In September 1936, Nicolson met the Channons at a party in Austria. They had ‘fallen much under the champagne-like influence of Ribbentrop … They had been to the Olympic Games and had not been in the least ...”

“... TV. The Beijing shooting marked the climax of seven weeks of student-led demonstrations, all freely reported on national and international TV news. Unhindered by the conciliatory overtures of the Beijing city authorities (the People’s Liberation Army supplied quilts, and the Beijing municipality set up portable toilets), the first demonstrators from ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... the woman’s attitude. The effort is, in fact, too evident, with something readymade about the freely emotional language of her reflections. For her, as for the men, love offers an alternative to loneliness. The background of her life is exile from the Christian community in the Caucasus from which Amar brought her: ‘Jali was his father’s son; alien ...”

“... York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”