“... publishers, who thereby risked less on each individual title. The system gave considerable power to the buyers for Mudie’s and Smith’s, who in turn feared offending or disappointing their largely conventional upper and middle-class clientele. As usual with such rigged markets, the whole system was invisibly underpinned by shared social assumptions ...”

“... of sociology, and drama favours a stage without too much human clutter. Veronica, the narrator of Anne Enright’s The Gathering, somewhere in the middle of a tribe of 12 (seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom), suggests there’s a certain uniformity about the large family: ‘There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered ...”

“... archive, now online, is a gory mish-mash of psychedelia, drugs, the occult, squatting, flower power, music, libertarian sexual politics – softly pornographic while staunchly pro-gay, with a smattering of second-wave feminism – and a contempt for the establishment that occasionally strays into serious politics. IT had been quicker to respond to ‘les ...”

“... province of Katanga. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed after only three months in power. Four months later he was assassinated by a scratch firing squad overseen by former Belgian colonial police officers. In 2001, a Belgian parliamentary committee concluded that the government of the day ‘bore a moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s ...”

“... judges, saw fit to ponder for one moment what effect that had on their chances of a fair trial. Anne Maguire and her family, including 13-year-old Patrick, entered the dock in the Old Bailey on trial for possession of explosives after the massive publicity that attended the Guildford bombings trial, which had finished not long before. The media had made ...”

“... left him. For many people, the story which has come to represent all such stories is the story of Anne Frank, whose ordeal in hiding in Amsterdam was mocked by a fate that decreed she should be discovered and transported within a few months of liberation. Harry Mulisch treats the plight of the Dutch Jews, and of Jews everywhere at that time, with his own kind ...”

“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”

“... there was nothing false or laughable in him. At 27, Achille-Cléophas had married the 18-year-old Anne-Justine-Caroline and immediately produced a son, Achille, who, as his name foretold, was to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Achille, however, there were three children who all died shortly after birth, so that Gustave was born eight years after his ...”

“... kinder things about his worst enemy. ‘To write a lampoon on oneself is not exactly unique,’ Anne Barton has pointed out; ‘it is, however, fundamentally paradoxical.’ Love suggests that ‘To the Post Boy’ may have been a pre-emptive strike on Rochester’s part, an attempt to silence his enemies ‘by flaunting a brilliance in invective they had ...”

“... sick labourers were gassed at a work camp and, after the fascist Arrow Cross party came to power in late 1944, thousands of Jewish forced labourers were brought in to build fortifications along the border with Austria, many of whom ended up shot and buried in mass graves. It’s not that Kristóf was unaware of the war, or didn’t feel its ...”

“... during the war). Colour printing had always been emblematic of Vogue’s modernity and spending power – Nast insisted on full colour covers from the very beginning – and ‘Vogue’ 100’s small darkroom of slides show the luminosity and saturation that were now possible; the hues are as rich as any Boucher. More portable cameras made travel possible ...”

“... winnowing of monastic life with the same rationale as Wolsey’s. It concentrated its destructive power on the Anglo-Norman element, since many of the surviving houses from the 11th and 12th centuries were now unfeasibly small by Tudor standards. This meant that the dissolutions up to and including the 1536 act spared at one chronological extreme the ...”

“... furious dignity in the face of prejudice. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ takes on an added power when the eyes are Pacino’s giant brown hooded eyes, so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a ...”

“... China had already taken the wheel). The company, Britishvolt, collapsed just after Labour won power in 2024, but the Starmer government has pursued the link between green jobs, economic growth and votes in the same gung-ho spirit as Johnson, Democrats in the US and mainstream parties in the EU. The transition from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy needs ...”

“... To be sure, major killers disappeared periodically but not through the agency of doctors or the power of science. Thus in medicine – unlike physics, chemistry or engineering – an immense accumulation of learning from the scientific revolution to our own century had almost no positive effect. One irony, among many, is that medicine became ...”