“... I have therefore no answer to those who believe that if we had looked sufficiently closely at France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, the United States or anywhere else we would have come up with other and better proposals for reform of the system in England and Wales. I can only say that among the people we consulted either formally or informally about other ...”

“... the second time to a well-off widow, wrote The Spirit of the Age and the Life of Napoleon, toured France and Italy, and died in Soho in 1830 reputedly with the words: ‘Well, I’ve had a happy life!’ But what about Sarah Walker? She moves forever – alternately prim and sensuous, banal and bewitching – across the lurid stage of the Liber Amoris, but ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... Nureyev in the middle, until the French shouted: ‘Ah non! Ne le touchez pas – nous sommes en France.’ He was immediately engaged by the Marquis de Cuevas company and was back on stage in a week, giving another sensational performance as the prince in Sleeping Beauty in a theatre surrounded by police cars and the world’s press. He took at least 24 ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties. Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany which Mann had had with his brother ...”

“... what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... savage reductions in jobs and welfare and a climate of job insecurity and social demoralisation. France, Germany and the rest of the EU nations are, after all, straining mightily to reach the Maastricht target of a 3 per cent budget deficit. If that is difficult for G7 states it is going to be tough indeed for South Africa, where there is less fat to ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... more than a year later thanks, in part, to US pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo-captions such as: ‘Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making “great strides towards democracy”, Zia’s henchmen gunned down ...”

“... round gone ahead, it would have seen the country rally round the opponent of the extremist, as in France, resulting in victory for Lasconi. Even if Georgescu had won, parliament could have kept him in check. So the election shouldn’t have been cancelled? ‘They shouldn’t have done it.’ During my stay I rented an apartment in Bucharest’s Old Town, in ...”

“... Left to his own devices, Putin would have preferred to say the bare minimum about it. But once France and Germany came out against the impending invasion, it was not easy for him to sidle quietly off-stage. On a visit to Paris, Chirac cornered him into a joint communiqué opposing the war – though the French alone threatened a veto in the Security ...”