“... cheered Orwell up in his last three months, according to Anthony Powell, though it greatly annoyed Stephen Spender, who resented being told by a snip of a girl to limit his political conversation with G.O. to twenty minutes. Her next marriage was in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been jailed four years earlier in the scandalous homosexuality trial that ...”

“... electrical engineer with a talent for management and business. Malachowsky and Priem, according to Stephen Witt’s Thinking Machine, had complementary skills – they were, respectively, an architect and a chip mechanic. They wanted to make a new kind of chip, optimised for a rapidly growing sector: video games. Their employer, the large chip company LSI ...”

“... can be trained to distinguish fraudulent from bona fide transactions. However, if fraud occurs in small distant purchases and in large local ones, as in Figure 1, the task of classification is too complex. The approach only works with problems that are ‘linearly separable’ and, as should be clear from Figure 1, no single straight line will separate the ...”

“... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...”

“... and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the ...”

“... from Egypt to Europe this year.’ For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant unemployment, especially among the young. As the Dutch president, Mark Rutte, put it in Cairo, ‘sometimes you have to dance with whoever’s on the dance floor.’ Some ...”

“... is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover ...”

“... best accommodate her. Like ‘Shingle’ in the United States, English ‘Queen Anne’ offered a small-scale house in which comfort, style and convenience were combined. And there, like so many of us, Rybczynski would have been glad to leave the story of ‘home’: a tale of ‘gradual evolution’ which has successfully accommodated the disappearance of ...”

“... segue comes in various sizes (that was a medium). This sentence ending would qualify as a small: Einstein, replying in 1915 to a letter from Karl Schwarzschild, was ‘unaware that he was writing to a dead man’. It’s a true statement – if Einstein had known he was writing to a dead man he would presumably have stopped – but the piquant hint of ...”

“... Yet for all the compressed magic of this episode, the mystery is that this character and this small love-confusion should require the great background of the war, and those epic colours; that these convoluted amorous pursuits should depend on and find their place within such a magnificent tapestry. It is not so much that the film explores the relation of ...”

“... reference works, universities. His languages were English and Latin, and Kiessling notes the small holdings in other tongues. By its very breadth it seems to describe the crisis facing an intellectual culture based essentially upon the mastery of all of the available texts, and the same may be said of his great work, The Anatomy of Melancholy. We are ...”

“... Bacon complains of biographical literature of his day. He says that actions both great and small, public and private, sho’d be so blended together as to secure that genuine nature and lively representation, which forms the peculiar excellence and use of biography.’ Fisher quotes these wise words of Jenner’s, but his book ignores them. Church ...”

“... the Edinburgh and Quarterly. These were long and serious to a fault, and catered to a public as small as the journals were high-minded. Politically-motivated, the quarterlies were liable to subordinate independent judgment to party ends. Anonymity ensured that the reviewer for his part subordinated personality to the collective self of the journal. There ...”

“... The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the Caribbean Echo, a small newspaper that served West Indians in Miami. Butler testified that Maharaj had paid the newspaper $400 to accuse the Moo Youngs of theft. The Moo Youngs then got the newspaper to publish a series of articles that claimed Maharaj was a ...”

“... firms dominated Iraq’s economic life. Riverboat freight on the Euphrates was monopolised by Stephen Lynch & Co. When the Chalabis set off for their frequent trips to Lebanon and elsewhere they travelled on the coaches of the Nairn Transport Company. Andrew Weir & Co, for whom Hadi Chalabi was the principal grain buyer, dominated the country’s barley ...”