“... and seaside holidays. And they became the conduit for advertising on a huge scale: a print by Alfred Concanen from 1874 shows passengers and trains in a large, busy station dwarfed by posters twenty feet across covering the wall of the train shed, promoting the virtues of Lamplough’s Pyretic Saline and Crosby’s Balsamic Cough Elixir. The best way ...”

“... and the unofficial lesbian avant-garde of Natalie Barney and Janet Flanner and Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire. Until finally, in 1933, she published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and a new era of celebrity began.Now we have​ Francesca Wade’s graceful, exacting biography of Stein and Toklas, and of the ways in which Stein has been interpreted and ...”

“... in an obscure corner of Afghanistan, except in so far as the local bigwigs might help them hunt down al-Qaida. The small contingent of US special forces based in Helmand between 2001 and 2006 didn’t mean to poison the well for their successors, but that was what they, together with the mujahedin commanders, did. The commanders used the Americans to ...”

“... Aspects, Woolf said that if she were writing a book about fiction she would feel she must ‘hunt a little’. That sounds like fair comment. Among other contemporaries there were novelists who took a keen practitioner’s interest in developing new ways of relating fabula and syuzhet and, as a mark of their difference, avoiding the straightforward ...”

“... that the Guardia were up against hopeless odds. In this bruising, violent but strangely abstract hunt, manoeuvrability has a clear advantage. The organised traffic of people from Albania is abetted in Puglia by the Sacra Corona Unità, one of Italy’s four Mafia conglomerates, which also handles tobacco smuggling – now a Guardia priority (as it is for ...”