“... book could be expected to have the guile to become prime minister. What, then, is there left for Edward Pearce to say? His biography is a handsome and informative study, benefiting from the co-operation of its subject, notably by means of unique access to the diary which Healey kept from the age of 16. Evidently a spare and terse record, this has provided ...”

“... novelists rested comfortably in the routines that had brought them success in the past, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73) was always committed to experimentation. He was his own pitiless taskmaster, working for money as strenuously as a starveling, and received £30,000 from Routledge for a 15-year option on his novels. He wrote successful silver-fork ...”

“... it involves – undergirds the tremendously resonant concept of ‘Orientalism’ as laid out by Edward Said in his 1978 book of that title. As Said presents it, Orientalism is a Western discourse that essentialises the Arab world in derogatory terms (as effeminate, decadent, timeless and so on), and is intimately bound up with the imposition of imperial ...”

“... wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, loved him. But perhaps it was because her two older sons had died young, one in infancy and the other fighting for Italian independence in 1831.Edward Shawcross’s new biography is in many ways an attempt to rescue the reputation of a man he calls the ‘people’s emperor’. It reappraises ...”

“... Over the past year evidence has been emerging that the Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 young women into sex slavery during their occupation of East Asia. Those so enslaved were termed ‘comfort women’, about 80 per cent of whom were Korean. Some were as young as 12, hauled out of their schools, often under a quota system, and carted off to army barracks and outposts all the way from Manchuria to the South Pacific ...”

“... father had survived the camps, but on his return to Poland had taken up life with a woman whom the young Roman instantly and inevitably rejected as his mother’s usurper. All this forms a well-known recipe for adolescent hooliganism. Polanski, however, who would have made a memorable little hoodlum in those years of black market and violence, surmounted his ...”

“... Iran Modern (2018), Pahlavi writes that the idea occurred to her in the late 1960s, when a young woman painter complained there was nowhere in Tehran where artworks could be permanently displayed. Pahlavi asked her cousin, the architect Kamran Diba, to come up with a design. He planned the building around a central atrium, which spirals below ground ...”

“... And her daughter’s really suffered. It just shows, someone can do something terrible at a very young age and then change completely, d’you not think? Yes, I say, unsure, out of my depth, yes I suppose they can. A tall, watchful, intense man with coal black hair streaked with silver, he seems eaten up by something, somehow closed in and elsewhere, yet ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... theology he inherited, while resolutely demolishing the bricks and mortar beneath. Edward Schillebeeckx, one of the Council’s most eminent theologians, was summoned to Rome to be cross-examined no less than three times in the first year of the new papacy. Hans Küng, Vatican 2’s other great luminary, had his teaching licence revoked. ‘Be ...”

“... And for this they collected and accounted for small sums given ‘of devotion’. The store of the Young Men (all bachelors of communicant age) raised larger sums from parties (church ales) to keep the lights burning before the patronal image of St George. Although ‘devotion’ is a somewhat inaccessible substance – we cannot weigh or measure the piety of ...”

“... a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this ...”

“... The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the ...”

“... a well-meaning but improvident clerk in the navy pay office, was sent to debtors’ prison, with young Charles put to menial work in a blacking factory – a social disgrace that demoralised him and from which he never fully recovered, keeping it a secret from the world (even from his children) until his death. The desire to have this experience ...”

“... has happened to her as trying to rejoin it, to rejoin the hopeless situation of herself and the young Indian, Hari Kumar, who knows only England and English ways, and now finds himself having to live in India and be an Indian. But these things don’t explain themselves: they have to be explained to us, and Scott explains them very well indeed, makes them ...”