“... the position of the pro-Europeans in Belgrade looked shaky. In almost every forecast for the 11 May election the nationalist Radical Party (SRS) stood a very good chance of forming a government. A few days before the vote, people in the capital watched the streets fill with Radical supporters, fresh off the buses, heading for a downtown rally, their blue ...”

“... of private lives to illustrate his themes. It is in these private histories, he writes, ‘that we may find . . . the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those ...”

“... out of pain and able to rise from her bed. She recovered from her paralysis in February 1899. In May she went into a convent for a retreat. She followed the nuns’ strict timetable for prayer and thought it ‘too easy’. All the same, she wanted to stay with them, but they wouldn’t let her because of her poor health. They demanded ‘four medical ...”

“... more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in the sensations of embodiment. Witness the first paragraphs of Victorine, the best of the eight, now ...”

“... from his fellow MPs (which he would have been unable to do), and three days after Theresa May had become prime minister. When I arrived at Broadcasting House for the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers you always ...”

“... in all political action and about the ‘diabolical powers’ intrinsic to politics, which may warp a leader beyond recognition. He is sharp too on the subject of vanity, a cardinal sin in a politician, and its dependent disorders, lack of responsibility and lack of objectivity. Weber’s is a prescription for heroes; I wonder if any politician could ...”

“... his opposite. It was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto who wrote: ‘Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more ...”

“... motives. The loss of innocence feels to a Murdoch character like an injury for which he may reasonably demand a reparation not to be distinguished in its effects from revenge; his inability to bear his own guilt seems to require an act of self-restoration – or self-annihilation – that risks repeating his crimes. A character is cruel to others in ...”

“... even in her fiction, a critic of the arguing, roving, appreciative sort. Quote liberally, she may have taught me, and there will be a synthesis of your thought and its object, the beam of the eye taking an active part in creating what it sees. I felt it vividly from the beginning: I am reading her reading. I am watching F.R. Leavis – who taught ...”

“... was a word Pevsner relished.Reilly’s galère left out a number of artists of whose existence he may have been unaware, just as they may have been unaware of each other. Patrick Abercrombie mentioned some of them in the introduction to his Book of the Modern House (1939): ‘Mackintosh with his unrestrained fantasy in ...”

“... In this way, he ‘mixed personal and public metaphors, signs and symbols, words and icons’. He may have ‘climbed out of modernism’, but his performances depended upon the hushed veneration – or critical cowardice – expected in the white-walled sanctuaries of modern art. Would he have earned such applause in the theatre? What would be the reaction ...”

“... that his preferences and impatiences seldom disturb any reader not out for a quarrel. We may doubt on principle that Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) could be ‘completely objective’ in its depictions, but our guide’s belief in the validity of a neutral authorial stance allows him to get close to a practical transparency – not a bad trait ...”

“... Cardiff, is couched in rhyme royal, a stanza which is a Manx-cat version of ottava rima, though it may well predate it, having been used by Chaucer. Auden also decided on rhyme royal for ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, probably to avoid too direct a comparison with Byron and the Italians. James writes: Now I myself, though full-time a pop lyricist, Have found the ...”

“... of an ambitious bureaucrat. The cause was Freud’s: Jones had simply made the arrangements. Jones may be more than the straight man in the double-act of these letters, and in the tortured history of psychoanalysis, but what the correspondence does reveal is the sado-masochism of his relationship with Freud. By the same token it also reveals the new genre of ...”

“... got to get them out of here.’ And my grandmother, whatever reassuring fictions she may have told her children, took her jewellery with her, and ordered the maid servants to pack a trunk of family valuables. Some shadow passed across her mind, and she took precautions, and that is why there is a silver ewer and basin in my house, one piece of ...”