“... existed. That sentiment persisted until the 1967 war. Even two years after it, when the young Max Hastings visited Israel, he, like so many, was ‘thrilled by the brilliance of Israel’s military achievement’, as he said in his recent Leonard Stein lectures, in which he went on to describe his subsequent disillusionment. Tony Judt is now an ...”

“... bisexual, transgender and queer’ people, while trolling communities disproportionately comprise young white men in Anglophone or Nordic countries. Phillips describes the way they perform their whiteness and a particular type of masculinity – their racist trolling of Obama, for example, or their habitual use of the term ‘fag’. Masculinism is built into ...”

“... won seven world titles, an achievement equalled only by the game’s dominant player in the 1990s, Stephen Hendry. He has made more century breaks – at the time of writing, 1240 – and more 147s (the maximum score you can get in a single frame) in tournament play than anyone else. O’Sullivan was given the nickname ‘Rocket’ early on, because of his ...”

“... in the Equality Act means ‘biological sex’. Two trans people applied to intervene (Professor Stephen Whittle and Victoria McCloud, a former judge), hoping to give a sense of what the case might mean for individuals in their situation, but only Amnesty International was given the opportunity to make the human rights argument, and its perspective was ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... the dust-heap the remains of the Christmas pudding (‘idolatrous confectionery’) offered to young Edmund by the servants. The equivalent moment in The Recognitions hardly measures up: a guest invited for Wyatt’s fourth birthday brings a plus one, so under pressure from Aunt May (who has apparently baked an exact number of slices) Wyatt must sacrifice ...”

“... is grasped for its incremental and associational significance. It is a place of synecdoche, in Stephen Bann’s sense, where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts and where value is distinctly not of the tradeable kind. If the continuities of ancestral residence were to be broken, then the associational magic would die. If an object were to ...”

“... By the time of the libels, most of her older siblings had left home. Only two brothers, Stephen and Ernest, both of them labourers but often unemployed, remained. Edith’s mother is described by Hilliard as ‘quiet and unobtrusive’ whereas her father was irritable and quick to meddle in the affairs of others. At the time of the libels, Edith was ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... explains that he first met Day Lewis at Harvard during the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to ...”

“... in his fiction that has attracted criticism from other South African writers, such as Gordimer and Stephen Watson. Watson has objected that Coetzee’s concern with textuality means that his work is ‘little more than an artfully constructed void’, while Gordimer has identified as a weakness what she calls his ‘revulsion against all political and ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping dusk, mysterious in their ...”

“... Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the ...”