“... at the edges. The face is sharp and pale, the gaze challenging, the nose prominent, the mouth small, the lips bright red. In her left hand she holds a small book – probably a prayer book. She is a very stylish widow, if not a merry one. It is no great surprise to find the soi-disant countess taking arms against the ...”

“... professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in ...”

“... 31-year-old Neapolitan woman called Tiziana Cantone sent video footage of herself having sex to a small group of friends. Someone posted the footage online, and it rapidly went viral. A phrase she spoke to an unidentified partner in one of the films – ‘You’re making a video? Good’ – became a favourite punchline on social media; it was printed on ...”

“... of the Journal of Botany’, Swartz posted a few tweets about the case. The lead prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, described this as a ‘wild internet campaign’ that moved the case ‘to an institutional level’. In November 2011, nine more felony counts were added. There were several rounds of plea negotiations: the jail time on offer in exchange for a ...”

“... class displaced and the consequent disarray of lesser Protestant families in their orbit: ‘the small world of the little big men of the provinces’. Beginning in the 19th century, Irish landed estates were sold off and Protestant political privileges dismantled, a process much accelerated in the 1920s by the War of Independence and subsequent civil ...”

“... less than 1 per cent of Britain’s total population. And it has not only been comparatively small, it has also been relatively safe. Unlike Russia or France or Austria or Germany, there have been no pogroms, no show trials, no outbreaks of orchestrated anti-semitism, no final solutions. Ever since Anglo-Jewry’s return to Britain on the eve of the ...”

“... Mario Chigi – which was large enough to be a serious drain on the Papal revenues but too small to be taken seriously by the European powers. On the other hand, despite the losses incurred during the Reformation, the spiritual domains of the Popes remained vast. The Papacy was a power to be reckoned with, however difficult this power was (and is) to ...”

“... Such Were the Joys; Beaton by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ in a voice ‘small but true’, and with what he also memorably described in A Georgian Boyhood as ‘an unsettling persuasiveness’. Connolly himself was less precocious, but did his best as the all-purpose old-fashioned aesthete. When he and Orwell went on to Eton the ...”

“... Sylvia disliked (‘I went into Valentine’s bedroom before she was up, and my eye fell on a small rosary by her bed, curled up and neat as a snake’) and she caused Warner, notionally quite permissive in such matters, much torment by a protracted and agonised affair with another woman. She was extravagantly loved and when the time came deeply ...”

“... now in breaking industry’s resistance to my policies. I shall win over the managers and the small businessmen, and I shall get the nationalised industries to welcome the planning agreements; I shall isolate the big Tory companies, then show how much money they have been getting from the Government, and if they don’t want it, they don’t have to have ...”

“... a personal friendship which lasted some twenty-two years. But all in all these elements make up a small proportion of the whole, and they depend on the fortuitous availability of material. They cannot be said to construct the dimension of ‘social reality’ that would have provided Russo with the test case for which he had apparently hoped. Here he had bad ...”

“... assertion that the Government was motivated by ‘racism and a certain amount of xenophobia’. As Stephen Braidwood has pointed out in Black Poor and White Philanthropists, it was a voluntary scheme. If London’s black poor were as canny and had community networks as well-established as Gerzina claims, why did they opt for the ‘deadly trap’ of Sierra ...”

“... Prendergast, who in 1971 edited the Cambridge structuralist pamphlet ‘Signs of the Times’ with Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe, might be said to have played a small part in the assault on mimesis. Now he has tentatively and scrupulously set out to rehabilitate it. Plato argued for excluding the poets because he ...”

“... house. The German states came out of it because of the strength of the court music at a host of small towns: that, and the Kantors at the free cities. The respectability and social worth of the composer-musician is shown in the dynasties – Mozart as well as Bach – which allowed the art to be passed on from one generation to the next. Purcell seems to be ...”

“... and Bakalar’s evidence comes from impeccable professional sources. The Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, is a rare survivor from a generally lethal form of cancer. Chemotherapy induced in him ‘long periods of intense and uncontrollable nausea’ which only smoking joints alleviated. Gould notes that he had never personally approved of ...”