“... very week you sat upon my knee, twined your arms around me, caressed me with every mark of tenderness.’ It drifted on in a kind of idealised, erotic stalemate through the autumn and winter of 1820. The printed text speaks of kisses and caresses, of her sitting on his lap for hours on end, of the ‘liberties’ he took and the ...”

“... the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy wunderkind.2 ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy,’ he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century”.’ How will this entrancing prospect come ...”

“... uncovered a pattern of casual and widespread corruption among officers of all ranks. Sir Robert Mark, the Metropolitan Commissioner at the time, was determined to root out the ‘bad apples’. In February 1976 Mark announced that 82 officers had been dismissed following formal proceedings; a further 301 had left ...”

“... not say so. She was wondering if the casserole she had left in the oven would get too dry at Gas Mark 4. Perhaps 3 would have been better. Dry it may well have been but there was no need to have worried. The thieves took the oven and the casserole with it. The Ransomes lived in an Edwardian block of flats the colour of ox-blood not far from Regent’s ...”

“... good bye even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow’). It is hard to say they are off the mark, for the long Severnising of Keats (which now includes his friends’ retroactive attempts at rescue) has made it extremely difficult to read the poetry and the life as he wrote and lived them and to understand how they mattered.Denise Gigante’s The Keats ...”

“... On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally ...”

“... It was an ecstatic evening, from the royal arrival just after nine until ‘at 1.45 the king rose and I showed him to his car … it was the very peak, the summit, I suppose of social superiority, the King of England and the Kents etc to dine, to dine with me.’ (Channon was puzzled when the king said ‘I want to pump shit,’ presumably a mishearing ...”

“... out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing ...”

“... 1942, he did not ‘believe you have to be a standout from your fellow men in order to make your mark in the world. Average will do it.’ A plain speaker from the heartland who would avoid being corrupted by Hollywood, and later by Sacramento and Washington: this was the core of the Reagan legend.Throughout his career, Reagan spent much of his mental life ...”

“... Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was mostly waste.’ Quite so. It is striking that, from the start, Lowell is about rewriting. ‘The Exile’s Return’, the opening poem in Lord Weary’s ...”

“... It became clear that Britain had joined at too high a rate in 1990. When German interest rates rose in the aftermath of reunification the consequences were ruinous for Major’s strategy, with the Bank of England unable to defend sterling, despite putting interest rates up by two points in a single day. The German rate rise was a consequence of the ...”

“... credit since he took over in 2006 – the portfolio of the government’s development bank, BNDES, rose sevenfold after 2007. Offering preferential rates to leading companies that added up to a much larger subsidy than outlays to poor families, the ‘Bolsa Empresarial’ cost the treasury about double the Bolsa Família. Favourable to large commodity and ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... writings: the rights alone, according to Biskind, were $250 million. Per episode costs rose remorselessly. Deadwood was estimated to have cost as much as $6 million per episode. By the fifth season of The Sopranos, an episode was thought to cost $10 million. Episodes of the Second World War series The Pacific came in at $21 million a pop; for ...”

“... in 1930, when a 38-year-old professor of Anglo-Saxon and father of four small children sat down to mark some exam scripts. On a blank page he found himself writing this: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ This is still the first sentence of the children’s classic we know.He always said he had no idea where the sentence came from, or what a ...”