“... and according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, around the world, whichever country they may be in, ultimately they do all belong to the same partnership. I hope that’s clear.’ Well of course it was clear. The companies were completely separate from each other but were bound together. This formula has been at the centre of a long legal action as ...”

“... envy [of us] is like ashes in the mouth.’ But isn’t the enjoyment of the envy others may have for us a lot more pleasant than ashes in the mouth? Praise that doesn’t cost the praise-giver anything to give lacks conviction. Doesn’t their envy of us imbue with sincerity whatever praise they might give us? Envy is no less sincere than ...”

“... respects, the retail revolution of the Fin de Siècle shaped the conventions of modern shopping, may even have invented them. For a century at least, according to the marketing guru Paco Underhill in Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, women have used shopping as ‘reward, bribe, pastime, an excuse to get out of the house, a way to trawl for potential ...”

“... a conscience can be uneasy bedfellows (though preferable to privilege without a conscience). They may give rise to dislocated feelings of guilt, which can lead to a perverse envy of the deprived – how lucky they are to be free of these feelings of guilt – or a conviction that privilege is, in fact, a form of deprivation, particularly deprivation of ...”

“... never go to those trendy plays in small off-off-Broadway theatres where God knows what indignities may be visited on the audience in pursuit of its edification or entertainment. If I’m forced to go to one, I sit in the middle of a row in the middle of the house, where peripatetic actors can’t get at me. ‘What have I got to lose?’ My nerve, for ...”

“... cerebral inactivity. The first result of a morbid excess in this direction is headache, which may be taken to indicate that the brain is out of repair; this is followed by stupidity; should the disorder continue imbecility supervenes, ending occasionally in insanity.’ Thus, as brains get bigger and people get better, fecundity falls off, such that the ...”

“... a woman could put on without assistance. This discrepancy between women’s experience and men’s may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed in female terms. It is common enough to find books which purport to be about some universal aspect of human experience but turn out, on closer ...”

“... that of self-regard, which alerts us to the possibility that societies, no less than individuals, may be flattered by their own lofty sense of purpose when confronted by human misery. ‘The national consensus on American history as a history of progress,’ Sontag writes, ‘is a new setting for distressing photographs – one that focuses our attention on ...”

“... or the loss of background information, are rebuked by John Hamilton: ‘Preposterous as it may sound, this book earnestly considers the possibility of Pindar’s obscurity’ – that is to say, deliberate obscurity. However, though Hamilton is not afraid to engage with Pindar, he is more concerned with more recent authors. When, for example, the ...”

“... of talks cannot be excluded. Disputes over territory between local people and outside rulers may be contained by war; they cannot be solved. Putin recognised this when he authorised one of his top generals to meet Maskhadov’s envoy three years ago. Although that encounter got nowhere, it established that negotiations are not unthinkable. Perhaps the ...”

“... Whether or not Musa has been healed by Jesus is an open question. Musa believes he has, but it may be a coincidence: this is hardly evidence-based medicine. And even if Jesus is responsible, it needn’t be a miracle; the water and chest compression may have helped – in a godless, biological, rationally explicable ...”

“... not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into ...”

“... written an excellent study of Lloyd George in opposition, is well aware of all this: indeed, it may have been out of a scrupulous wish not to revisit fields already ploughed that he pays so little mind to it here. Yet, however intended, this was a poor choice. In the thirty years since Campbell’s earlier book, Lloyd George has become something less than a ...”

“... On 28 May 1919, the residents of Moscow woke to find that the walls of the Strastnoi convent had been daubed with what at first glance might have appeared to be crude blasphemous slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: ‘I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!’ ‘Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall ...”

“... his celebrated warning that ‘the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon.’ Mellor may have meant what he said, but he was certainly not speaking for the rest of the Government. As far as the majority of his colleagues were concerned the newspapers had not even walked through the saloon’s swing doors, and Calcutt was just a device to quell ...”