“... that several times Wharton was hampered by the standards imposed by periodicals like the Ladies’ Home Journal. There was a wide readership (and a good deal of money) available to writers for these magazines, but Edith’s stronger views and deeper knowledge had often to be camouflaged. One of the ‘gifts of chance’, as Shari Benstock clearly explains, was ...”

“... paid employment in the marketplace while their wives were to serve as angels of maternal virtue at home. As Wally Seccombe writes in Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (1993), this system (public man, private woman) spread in due course to the working classes, especially after schooling became ...”

“... In September 2010, the home secretary was warned that her plans to cut police funding could undermine their ability to deal with the tensions that would result from the government’s austerity package. ‘The British public,’ she replied, ‘don’t simply resort to violent unrest in the face of challenging economic circumstances ...”

“... In the devolution referendum of 1979 the Scottish people voted by a narrow margin for home rule, but not in sufficient numbers to meet the controversial threshold laid out in the Scotland Act – 40 per cent of the electorate. In the general election that followed after the SNP forced a vote of no confidence in the Labour government, the ...”

“... which was being prepared for boarding on the airport apron. The plane had been chartered by the Home Office to deport sixty people, a number of them LGBTQ+, to Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone, where it was believed they might be at risk of persecution. The campaigners wore pink hats and carried a banner saying ‘No one is illegal.’ In court they listed ...”

“... show in a furious email Black wrote to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I ...”

“... at 14 and sailed before the mast to Melbourne and Calcutta, turned to typesetting when he came home, then lit out for the gold mines of British Columbia, before drifting into journalism and finishing up as managing editor of the San Francisco Times. In roaming the frontiers, he saw how land that was valueless yesterday could become worth many dollars an ...”

“... of dedications of exquisite lyrics to speck-like personages: ‘Terre Promise’ ‘For Herbert P. Home’, ‘Les Demoiselles de Sauve’ ‘To S.A.S. Alice, Princesse de Monaco’, ‘Mishka’ ‘To Henri Texeira de Mattos’ (the absence of Hallam from the title of In Memoriam looks even odder beside these scrupulously preserved gestures). In his ...”

“... Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a chip shop when they ran into their victim. It is barely worth speaking of anything as tangible ...”

“... telecommunications caught up, they also enjoyed a delicious freedom from further instructions from home base.The year after Trafalgar, Sir Home Riggs Popham insouciantly scooped up the Cape of Good Hope, before convincing himself that Pitt (who had in fact just died) would be delighted if he sailed up the River Plate and ...”

“... failed. One of the questions was ‘Who was Job?’ This mystified me. ‘Who was Job?’ I came home and asked, not even knowing it was a name and pronouncing it the same as in a job of work. ‘I’ve never heard of Job.’ And a good job I hadn’t. 25 April. Graffiti in the lift at the Middlesex Hospital: Love. Sex. Salt. An Arab, presumably, pining for ...”

“... story of the soul wandering away from God and then in torment and tears finding its way home through conversion is also the story of the entire created order.’ I would like to suggest that the Confessions is also a book about reading and the relation between text and truth. Indeed, it proved to be crucial, for better or for worse, in determining ...”

“... works of art through the roof. Those lucky few whose ancestors went on the Grand Tour and shipped home huge quantities of European art at knock-down prices in the 18th century now find themselves sitting on a goldmine. Selling off a Titian or a Rubens once a generation will keep the wolves of the Treasury at bay almost indefinitely, at any rate under existing ...”

“... the way in which he strings an exotic sketch of a minor character along a rope of exile. Stein in Lord Jim, for instance, with his collections of butterflies and ‘catacombs of beetles’, is said to have taken part in the revolutions of 1848, then fled to Trieste, and then to Tripoli, ‘with a stock of cheap watches to hawk about’. Bezmozgis is similarly ...”

“... abroad in this period were often put down to the fact that it was also exceptionally fortunate at home. Fortunate, it was believed, because – in the midst of European absolutism – the Glorious Revolution had bestowed upon it, and it alone, sound parliamentary government, religious toleration, and an end to dynastic conflict. Fortunate, too, in that its ...”