“... law of narrative order’ as an adequate way of construing the meaning of a life. Babies may be seen to entail stories because they embody the tyranny of linear causation – ‘first this happened and then that happened.’ They mock our sense of possibility. Like murders, they tell us that what’s done cannot be undone. They foreclose choice and ...”

“... century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even ...”

“... multitude of fine touches.’ A Sportsman’s Sketches, published in 1852, became a sensation and may have contributed to the liberation of the serfs in 1861 (Alexander II is said to have claimed it as an influence on his decision). For the rest of his life, Turgenev was the most famous Russian in Europe. His celebrity, but also the novelty of his ...”

“... in his later work – including The Enigma of Capital – the fount of all crisis. The term may seem paradoxical: what could it mean for capital to overaccumulate, when the entire spirit of the system is, as Marx wrote, ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’? How could capitalism acquire too much of what it regards as the sole good ...”

“... rôle s’arrête là.’ Indeed he ‘is really sorry for the extent to which this intransigence may be unhelpful and awkward for you as publisher’. The paragraph ends with a clarification that is also an imperative: ‘One must take him as he is.’ This determination to establish rules for relationships emerges again and again in the second volume of ...”

“... work To London or to India came home to die, Or came from London every spring To look at the may-blossom in the park. ‘While there has been some ingenious critical discussion about the extent to which the Old Man is an unreliable narrator,’ Foster declares, ‘his evocation of Coole expresses the playwright’s own emotions.’ Yet even if Coole was ...”

“... Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I am. The coincidence is always good for a laugh, particularly when it dawns that we must both have been conceived during the old August Bank Holiday, sex confined to the holidays perhaps, or ...”

“... billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner … for the benefit of the Iraqi ...”

“... system attempts to demarcate everything sharply, menacingly and in a hurry. For example, there may or may not have been something called the ‘Akwizgran Discrepancy’. A forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore suggested that when the new Kingdom of Belgium emerged in 1831 – much to the annoyance of the Congress ...”

“... in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men. This invocation mirrors the opening of The Second Defence, where he describes how he ‘accepted, of those very deliverers of the country, and by general consent, the part spontaneously assigned ...”

“... demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence ...”

“... sings with moral purpose like a Wesley hymn. And Browning goes on, almost as splendidly: ‘There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever.’ Browning’s prose expands ...”

“... didn’t necessarily land well with whichever wife, mistress, girlfriend or elevated groupie he may have been tethered to at the time. Apart from the hectic wear and tear of guilt pangs, paramour juggling, deceptions and flare-ups (in a jealous fit, he once slapped Staats hard across the face – ‘you could see the impact of his hand … all through the ...”

“... party position in Fujian. Sheridan says Xi ‘never went down well with the Fujianese’, which may be true, but the posting served his political rise. Over seventeen years, he worked his way up to become first secretary in the provincial capital, Fuzhou, just in time for an economic upturn in the city, before being made governor of the province. His record ...”

“... Angela Olive Stalker​ was born to a London mother and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick succession and started publishing her journalism in New Society magazine. Her ...”