“... a negative check. The positive claims of Ginzburg’s micro-history, however, rest on the power of the anomaly. For what micro-history could reveal, as illustrated dramatically in The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, was the existence of worlds undreamed of in standard versions of the past, challenging their easy acceptance. Still, the ...”

“... of exposition. The lawyer Coen needs legal and financial documentation from the genteel sisters Anne and Julia Bast in order to administer the estate of their brother Thomas, who died intestate. The sisters’ grip on relevance in conversation, and indeed reality, is far from fierce, but a family and a business are sketched in: Thomas has a daughter called ...”

“... rivers or the great collisions of rivers and oceans, that have clung to my memory with tenacious power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash ...”

“... in Z (1969), his thriller about the turmoil in Greece, where a military junta had recently seized power. The FLN agreed a co-production deal. It had also put up money for Klein’s documentary and for Monangambeee, which was approved for release a few months after the festival. ‘Having screened the film,’ the official report went, ‘the Department of ...”

“... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...”

“... at the University of California, San Diego. Dick said near the end of his life that he was ‘into power’: ‘Instead of society moulding me,’ he claimed, ‘I mould it.’ His late belief in his own visionary importance puts into new, sad light the schlubby repairmen, newspaper-puzzle obsessives and helpless Organisation Men in Dick’s earlier ...”

“... Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is wearing several of them in ...”

“... her from Trump, and from the politician with whom she is most often compared, Thatcher. Anne Jenkin, who helped set up Women2Win with May, says of the two: ‘Thatcher was the outsider. She was a man’s woman, and that was the secret of her success. She liked men; she liked men more than she liked women. And I don’t think that’s the case with ...”

“... its boiled-down form the memoir has a fragmentary quality but its value is further undermined by Anne Higonnet’s oddly ambivalent introduction. On the one hand, she claims for Le Brun the status of the ‘first modern woman artist … acclaimed in her own lifetime’ – an accolade which belongs to Kauffman, if to anyone. On the other, she seems ...”

“... jumped forwards in time. Lansley has not yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. He’d barely been in power a year when I talked to Porter. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about ...”

“... wrote, ‘by how many mentioned in almost the same breath’ the Ford machinists’ strike and Anne Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, which was doing the rounds ‘on ill-typed roneoed sheets’ in the early 1970s. ‘The startling disparity between the two catalysts … is more apparent than real. Women clearly sensed that the two were part ...”

“... pleasure that there is in life itself’. Even her hesitations reassure them. (‘Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?’) The immediacy in every phrase still shoots at us – the ding dong of the Rodmell church bells outside the window, coming between her and the words as she writes, and so clambering into ...”

“... Bacon gave his own party at his studio, to celebrate Michael Wishart’s marriage to his friend Anne Dunn. The party went on for two days and was, John Richardson reports,slightly presided over by the nanny, the blind nanny, who would be in the rocking-chair at the back of the studio … My mother had a house around the corner so I used to come and go at ...”

“... Spears and Geruso suggest that ‘it’s time to shake any residual belief in the magic, magnetic power of two.’But the point they want to make above all is that we have got the relationship between population and climate change all wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, the world seemed to be confronted by the twin threats of overpopulation and ‘global ...”

“... on other people. After all, if I can’t exist without you, then you have, among other things, the power to kill me. The rate of physical assault and murder of trans people is a great deal higher than it is for the general population. A 1992 London survey reported 52 per cent MTF and 43 per cent FTM transsexuals physically assaulted that year. A 1997 survey by ...”