“... of novels and short stories published; but fame came to her through a play written under the name Gordon Daviot. Richard of Bordeaux, about Richard II, was a huge West End hit in the early 1930s; it made the name of the young John Gielgud, who also directed; Ffrangcon-Davies was Queen Anne. Tey never managed to follow up its crazy success; Ffrangcon-Davies ...”

“... in particular, without whose endorsement the assent of the people cannot be assured. If either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair needs to summon the British electorate out of their armchairs in order finally to see the other off, then he will. But otherwise we probably shouldn’t wait by the phone. The Daily Mail has taken advantage of this hiatus in the high ...”

“... In its winter issue of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four ...”

“... my dearest is in danger.’ We have stumbled upon a hidden love story. A sad tale’s best for winter – this is a sad tale, this story of a January death. Johnson at this point seems battered by life, almost afraid of giving love lest it be taken from him. Johnson’s need for love substantiates his tremendous loyalty. The troubles of his parents seem to ...”

“... to the Express, with its much later first-edition time of 10 p.m., crying in imitation of Flash Gordon as he rushed out of the door: ‘I’ve only got four hours to save the Daily Express!’ ... The first copies of the Sun would then be brought, ink still wet on their pages. He would look through them virtually keeping an open phone line to the ...”

“... of the workings of change and transformation. The storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the Peasants’ Revolt, Captain Swing, the Gordon Riots and Watts tend to be reconstructed as a series of memorable tableaux, punctuating the flow of events and creating major divisions between what went before ...”

“... after a British separate peace, but not indefinitely. Sooner or later, the succession of German winter defeats followed by Soviet summer defeats would have given way to a more definite outcome. Even the permanently warring frontier that Hitler delighted to imagine, where Germanic youth could be tested and culled before procreating, presumed a defeated ...”

“... the married women’s property campaign.Bodichon was taken by her brother to Algeria for the winter of 1856, partly to stimulate her painting career, but also in the hope that its warmth and colour might revive her spirits. Here she met Eugène, a rugged, brooding doctor who healed the poor, loved nature and wrote books about social conditions. He was ...”

“... the way in which, on becoming leader of the Conservative Party, she put herself in the hands of Gordon Reece, a former television producer, who knew just what needed to be done. The hair was wrong, too suburban; it was restyled. The clothes were wrong, too fussy; they were replaced. The voice was wrong, too shrill; it was lowered in pitch through lessons ...”

“... In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The ...”

“... fall in love. Two bitter poems of 1908 mark the end of the relationship. Five years later, in the winter of 1913, Blok attended a performance of Carmen in St Petersburg and immediately fell in love with the heroine: Lyubov Aleksandrovna Delmas. ‘A fine mezzo-soprano with a scorching temperament, tawny eyes, red-gold hair and a voluptuous, graceful ...”

“... with artists who were busy inventing their reputations. One night, I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that ...”

“... Gladstone’s reminder that ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.’ The Gladstonian agenda does not apply solely to government, or even to a single party. Over the past two decades, each of the three main parties has experienced a Gladstonian ...”

“... on her books and clothes. Before the Clean Air Acts, everything in London, as soon as the winter fogs began, was black, or blackish, by the end of the day. Charlotte, always immaculate in white shirt-blouses, had once called laundry ‘the curse of civilisation’. But unluckily the language of hygiene – contamination, impurity, resistance, fight ...”

“... seen for three years, was good nature itself. It was another decade before I saw him again. In the winter of 1979, in a freezing church in Oxford, he rose like some wrathful divine to warn the congregation once more of the dangers of Gallican dogma. By now, his onslaught on Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, published the previous year, had roused much ...”