“... enough); in any case, his writing didn’t take off, and he gave it up. He had taken snapshots in France, and, almost by accident, he took up the camera again, making abstract pictures of New York street scenes and portraits of his friends. ‘Oh yes,’ he said years later of these beginnings, ‘I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat ...”

“... who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him. Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when ...”

“... these second-hand clothes, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, have a few labels marked ‘made in France’ and ‘made in USA’, but were overwhelmingly produced in the same countries as now, places like Mexico, Cambodia, China and Bangladesh. Manchester’s deindustrialisation is an old story now. I was reminded of Engels’s description of the way the ...”

“... Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Spawls, Amia Srinivasan, Chaohua Wang, Marina Warner, Bee Wilson, Emily Witt Elif BatumanWhen​ Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was finishing the tour for my new ...”

“... when Wilde entered the Hogarth Club ‘an old member of the club, ostentatiously staring at Wilde, rose from his chair and made for the door. One or two other members also got up. Everyone felt uncomfortable.’ In January 1891, six months after the magazine publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and three months before it came out in book form, Constance ...”

“... suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our just is cause. We cannot lose. I am fighting for France, Liberty, and those three snakes hiding behind the curtain. Farewell, vis-à-vis Fifi D’Orsay. If my laundry comes, send it general delivery, care of Russia, and count it – I was a sock short last week.’ A memory of the three brothers all playing ...”

“... entered the land of the Inquisition. As in all other inquisitions, the sun remained neutral. It rose and its light illuminated balconies decorated with Nazi banners. It was the Führer’s 47th birthday. I forgot to mention that all this occurred during the intermediary days of Passover. I don’t recall if we rode the same train the whole way or if we ...”

“... After a brilliant academic start – he became professor of Greek at Sydney in 1937 aged 25 – he rose in the war to the rank of brigadier without ever seeing action (something about which he always felt guilty). In 1945, he voted Labour as a protest against Appeasement. In 1950, he became a Tory MP. By 1955, he was a junior Treasury minister. In 1958, he ...”

“... and fight.’ When the police fired the first volley of tear gas, three white columns of smoke rose, and drifted silently across the square. Then the smell hit and kicked hard, somewhere between nostrils, eyes and stomach. A small woman in her mid-fifties leaned back against a bus stop outside a brothel, calmly smoking. Two young men sat on the pavement ...”

“... brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a fortune after drifting into show business by starting a record label. Those ...”

“... a year before the old life so shockingly blew away – I made a long-contemplated trip to France and Belgium to see the cemeteries of the First World War. My quest, though transatlantic, was a modest, conventional and somewhat anorakish one: I hoped to locate the grave of my great-uncle, Rifleman Lewis Newton Braddock, 1st/17th (County of ...”

“... home at most eight or nine times a year. Generally he returned from London well after midnight. He rose after a breakfast in bed of stewed apple, toast melba, tea, a glass of hot water and some pills, and left the house briskly at 8.20. His face was delicately shaved, he selected his overcoat with great care, put one arm in the sleeve, shook the coat up onto ...”

“... and from there to Vassar College. When she graduated, she moved to New York, and travelled in France and Italy. From 1938 she spent ten years in Key West, Florida. In 1942 she met, in New York, a Brazilian, Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares, and beginning in 1951, they shared a house near Petropolis in Brazil, and an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Bishop ...”

“... under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA ...”

“... blood. Robert McBride, sentenced to death by the apartheid regime’s security-judicial system, rose to high office in the security-judicial system of post-apartheid South Africa; at least some of the people who lost loved ones in the attack have not forgiven him. Walter treats South Africa as a paradigm of the way civil wars should be headed off. In her ...”