“... his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas Mayor. In 1981 Terence Kilmartin published a revision of the whole text, making ‘extensive alterations’ but hoping to ‘have preserved the undoubted felicity’ of much of the work. The new wordings were a matter partly of ...”

“... infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their ...”

“... nomination for president in 1960 carried this implication.) The myth of a West dominated by small family farms (Jefferson’s vision of the future) had already given way to the idea that the region was home to what Slotkin calls ‘bonanza capitalism’, the possibility of instant riches derived from successive gold rushes, a burgeoning oil industry and ...”

“... may be comical, too, since the chain of logic, inevitably, is made up of both large beads and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the ...”

“... banks but across an entire swath of the industry. It’s not a difficult scene to picture. In a small office with no windows, a pointy-headed, glasses-wearing Libor ‘submitter’ – that’s the name of the people who tell the BBA what the notional lending rate is that day – sits in front of a keyboard. In a large open-plan office with windows on all ...”

“... both spirits and diet by means of the Edwardian weekend house-party, picking up cottage or small-house commissions almost as if they were dance-partners. Indeed in a round about manner he landed his castle, Llangoed Hall, that way. He acknowledged this kind of luck almost as much as his lack of technical training – three months at the Architectural ...”

“... cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes), the vice president’s press secretary (known mainly as the wife of Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant architect of immigration policy) and Ivanka Trump’s personal assistant all test positive.The headline across the front page of the New York Times is: ‘us unemployment is worst since depression.’ That morning, the president ...”

“... must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight. 10 February. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he’d been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children’s cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmons animated film about a pig ...”

“... photos of the dead on commemorative mugs: Freddie Mercury, Laurel and Hardy, Princess Di. ‘Small dolls £1.99.’ The afterburn of celebrity as a memorial ashtray. Greenwich is deeply ambivalent about the whole Millennium Experience scam. Most of the place – the area around the Cutty Sark, phase one of the Dreadnought Library of the University of ...”

“... force or professional local government, could not have been ruled both gently and effectively. Stephen Greenblatt, who, in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, writes so memorably on More and Wyatt, impairs his case by too easily calling Henry VIII a Stalin, for the ambitions and resources of 20th-century tyranny were beyond the imagination of Tudor ...”

“... needed to do, on the brink of my rite of passage, was to shape the event so as to bring something small and truthful out of Dad, taking him away from reflexes and set attitudes. I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that ...”

“... to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’ (a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).Tories, however, have tended to have the last laugh, because, as Edmund Fawcett suggests early in his book, the left has been a ‘rash chess player’, too cocky and blinkered to strategise effectively against its opponents. Fawcett, a veteran ...”

“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... distinctive set of button-presses out of the experiences of his life. His Norwegian father made a small fortune by importing pit props to Wales. Dahl’s sister died at the age of seven. His father died soon after, leaving enough money for an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Dahl was then only three. He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding ...”

“... The village itself consists of little more than wooden sheds or barracks, interspersed with small garden plots. Many of the buildings have collapsed into themselves; others have been taken over by goats or stray dogs. One might expect the village to be in some distant corner of Russia, perhaps several days’ journey into the Siberian taiga. But it is ...”