“... bizarre forgotten episodes in English history. Louis crossed the Channel, landed at Thanet on 21 May 1216 and proceeded to London, then securely in the hands of the rebels, where he was proclaimed king, though not crowned. This invasion, or calling-in if you prefer, was just as much intended as a remedy against arbitrary rule as the invitation to William of ...”

“... high sustained string note on a film soundtrack. If the book doesn’t cast an immediate spell it may be partly a matter of page layout. Its paragraphs are substantial and sometimes enormous, occasionally passing the five-page mark though never the ten. The withholding of a pause on the page, a symbolic breathing space, is an indispensable aspect of some ...”

“... order in Italy. Hirschman was at one with the movement’s purpose but fast losing any taste he may have had for isms. Colorni confirmed him in that and the two men committed themselves to what Colorni called ‘little ideas’, making a pact ‘to prove Hamlet wrong’: doubt, they believed, could make one more certain about how to be. Adelman gives the ...”

“... of a lover will descend into speculations about the other woman (‘Only I wish her eyes may not be blue’). Mew’s own physicality – along with her relish for the physical – comes through strongly in Copus’s book. She had ‘something piquante about her’, a schoolfriend recalled, a way of turning round as she talked, ‘sort of pirouetting ...”

“... developments’, quite lacking the crucial quality he called ‘unexpectedness’. The artist may sit down to write with all sorts of intention, but the properly living novel will swiftly evade them: ‘If you try to nail anything down in the novel,’ he wrote, ‘either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.’ There you ...”

“... detention camp. The right-wing press was agitated by the prospect of her return. Reed’s judgment may have been right in law – his criticisms of the approach of the Court of Appeal are severe – but what stands out is the mode of reasoning he deploys. His judgment is almost impenetrably legalistic, with multiple appellate routes simultaneously ...”

“... we point to a long series of such observations as are detailed below, made by women observers.It may have been unpaid labour, but it was also progress. Pickering called, and the ladies answered. More money came from another heiress – the blind painter, Miss Bruce – and more women came to be actually employed at the observatory, earning between 25 and 50 ...”

“... It has been thought and the thought has been put into effect.’ The Western model of capitalism may have won – or survived – the Cold War, but so did the bomb. In fact, the bomb proliferated, and new nuclear powers emerged, driven by conflicts scarcely related to superpower confrontation. Thanks to the collapse of communism, we are no longer sure that ...”

“... For me the scene is deeply intertwined with the ending of persecution for homosexual acts. That may seem a leap, and it is not a point about empathy, or not only. Proust was extremely aware of the boldness of his material, and of the danger he was running regarding the obscenity laws and obloquy in his own social circles. John Sturrock, whose translation ...”

“... embedded in an anti-humanist view of subjectivity.These otherwise disparate intellectuals may have seemed more alike than they were, for they were united by a common enemy: existentialism. Sartre and Beauvoir and their adherents dominated the immediate postwar period in France. The new writers and theorists would have to slay the existentialist ...”

“... a new child. ‘That cow at Number Ten,’ her mother elaborates, is the one to blame. (EastEnders may well have played its part in provoking the Conservative Party’s repeated attempts to revoke the BBC licence fee.) Over the years, such political asides have been a steady accompaniment to the series as it charts the impact of social disadvantage on working ...”

“... record wasn’t perfect either. The plane carrying the first Belgian agent, Emile Tromme, in May 1941 forgot to drop his radio and clothes, and was so far off course that Tromme landed in a German POW camp. The psychological benefit of these heroic failures, however, was significant. News that some agents had arrived in occupied territory, spread by ...”

“... of the other. People designate as ‘private’ things which others can’t know about them, and may reserve ‘certain particular sins or shames or surprises of joy’ to this realm of the ‘private’. A sense of pitch – of hearing the tonalities of language that convey the existence of other minds and the claims made by the emotions of others – is a ...”

“... not what to do.strain upon strain,sound surging upon sound,makes my brain blind;as a wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to ...”

“... America’s attitude, the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, seemed to be: ‘Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us.’Service in the First World War also brought little lasting improvement in the Black condition. In the Crisis, the monthly publication of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois urged Black men ...”