“... General Smith’s book speaks of CNN fighting, rather than merely reporting, the war. Indeed, this may well be the first time a major American television news network has so openly collaborated with the propaganda machine of the US military. Peter Arnett, it seems clear in retrospect, was mainly useful as a way of creating the illusion of controversy and ...”

“... experiencing old age and bodily decline (‘Diabetes is now affecting both eyes, though what this may symbolise I can’t say’). And for a lot of the time it is a poem preoccupied with poetry: there are numerous one-line aphoristic definitions of ‘poem’ throughout, both weighty (‘Poem as cradle of the unbiddable name’) and flighty (‘Poem as equity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... American edition inscribed by her mother in black ink: ‘Edna Fischel, April 1900’, or ‘May 1900’ – she seems to have accumulated them as they appeared, the name and location of the publishers changing midway through the edition. A couple of the volumes are underlined and annotated in Martha’s hand. She probably read them during the ...”

“... of further questions or second trips. Between the lines of your unyielding story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the media, appears to have been mistaken. A less obvious consequence of this mistake has been its role in strengthening the North’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... away, but finessed for a world beyond the raucous, claustrophobic clubs they were used to. This may be the moment subculture jettisoned its prefix, and began to infiltrate the culture at large.The jacket covers of two of these new Beatles books feature the classic mid-1960s Fab Four: no longer buttoned up inside matching suits, but individually tailored in ...”

“... have to pack their bags and head out eventually – which they did, when the Phoney War ended in May 1940. In the meantime foreboding was blunted by a fatal propensity to look on the bright sight. Illusions died or lingered on in different ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had ...”

“... instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping-off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple larceny. Or is there? Is there – for me – a difference between what Dean calls ‘creative process’ and ‘simple larceny’? Or rather, between creative process and ...”

“... here: you can’t simply say that inequality means we are all suffering together. Instead, it may mean that the poor are doing so badly that the rich aren’t interested in looking at the wider picture. They are focused on making sure they don’t wind up poor. This is why the difference between ‘almost everyone’ and ‘everyone on average’ matters ...”