“... possessed almost equally of integrity and mendaciousness. In her desire for social acceptance, she may have exaggerated the gentility of her origins, while the accounts of her conversations with tribesmen, or the way she scores off local bores or bullies, a sharp-tongued Emma speaking perfect Arabic, smacks more than a little of l’esprit d’escalier. But ...”

“... Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The reasons for Jonson’s journey to Scotland are one such high point, his appearance ...”

“... in their acceptance of necessary descriptive duties. The result is that, line by line, she may be as anonymous, as manifold or, better, as mistakeable as a great poet gets. Other poets are predictably and more or less unvaryingly themselves, like cellophane packs of cigarettes from a vending machine; with Bishop you get the surprise gift in a plastic ...”

“... a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not taken, isn’t the novel at all but the short story, with its particular affinity for turning points. Certainly Roald Dahl’s story ‘Genesis and ...”

“... but the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the huge expansion of Britain’s empire may have made them increasingly visible. The black presence raised questions about what it meant to have such an empire, one composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religious beliefs. A number of cases of enslaved African men and women who had escaped ...”

“... with her grandmother, Picasso offered something she recognised.Gilot moved in with Picasso in May 1946. Soon after they left to spend the summer at Maar’s house in Ménerbes. Gilot had protested – it ‘seemed a strange thing to be doing’ and unpleasant for all involved – but Picasso reasoned that he had bought the house for Maar and so should ...”

“... will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedoms.’ The Donald may be no Adolf, but he sings the same Song of the Will. After the worst of wars, there has to be a winding down, a settlement of outstanding grievances, insisted on, whether brutally or charitably, by the victors, and resisted or grudgingly accepted by the ...”

“... to defend herself against her friend Cassie’s accusation that her own ‘woman-loving life’ may as well not exist for all the mention it receives in Faith’s stories.) Hers is a sturdy humanistic intelligence that ought to feel old-fashioned but is instead encouraging. Since each story is a conversation, or more than one, we always see people’s ...”

“... The scientists are frustrated. What began as ‘Why won’t they trust us when we know best?’ may have shifted to ‘If only they understood, they would trust us,’ but the underlying resentment is the same: irrational, unnecessary ignorance, encouraged by nefarious, myth-spreading activists, is to blame for the anti-GM movement. The resentment isn’t ...”

“... the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly to clear sensitive combat zones of potential fifth-columnists. Reports of ...”

“... a woman not a man. Jane Williams had shared those last months in Italy and, whatever Mary Shelley may have felt at the time about her husband’s attentions to this attractive musician to whom he addressed some of the most yearningly exquisite of his late lyrics, once back in England she herself became ‘excessively’, as she admitted, attached to her. Jane ...”

“... lost, and the reasons for its getting lost are part of the film. Introducing the film at Cannes in May 1979, Coppola said it wasn’t about Vietnam: it was Vietnam. By Vietnam he didn’t mean the country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a ...”

“... is difficult. ‘No one can ever be himself in this land,’ says the shadowy figure who may or may not be responsible for the double murder that closes The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990; translated in 1994). ‘In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I ...”

“... are not good things to be. Again, the key is Tolstoy (and Shakespeare). Power and sincerity may be concepts which most criticism and many hundreds of writers have venerated, yet as far as Bayley is concerned, Tolstoy’s easy epic power reveals how unnaturally most writers employ them: ‘powerful’ and ‘sincere’ work is likely to be willed ...”

“... other ways in which Cubism’s voyage might have ended. Braque was posted missing on the Somme in May 1915; when found, he was blind. What if this condition had been permanent? What if the hand of the surgeon who trepanned him had slipped? What if, like his fellow trepanee Apollinaire, he had survived the operation only to be carried off by the great ...”