“... Had he known about it himself? He retires from the force but lives on in San Francisco in what may be masochism or self-loathing. As Hitchcock depicts it, San Francisco is a steep, perilous place – and a character in the film. If the city is not the best place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James ...”

“... duke, a dotty recluse who prowled through underground mazes dug beneath his palace near Worksop, may have been indulging vaguely liberal prejudices. Today the tall stone pedestal survives: ‘In Gratitude for His Private Kindness, In Honor to His Publick Virtue’. Holes and scars suggest that there were once more inscriptions.Queen Victoria ordered the word ...”

“... bureaucrat, diplomat, sparkling conversationalist and incorrigible womaniser – that the reader may despair of conceiving any overall project undertaken by the man baptised Marie-Henri Beyle in 1783. Aside from ‘Stendhal’ there were scores of pseudonyms, any number of unfinished writings and thousands of letters and journal pages in which Beyle often ...”

“... such as his affairs with Leda Rafanelli and Margherita Sarfatti in the 1910s and 1920s, may have broadened his perspective, at least a little, whereas Claretta only confirmed him in his worst prejudices. With Leda Rafanelli, a pacifist who presided over a Milanese salon, he wrote of wanting to read ‘Nietzsche and the Quran together’. Margherita ...”

“... But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by far. This reconstruction of how this extraordinary novel arose, how it was published, what it means and what it has become is my way of saying thank you to France.Never abandoning this celebratory tone, The ...”

“... In​ 1894, Mary Molloy married Jimmy O’Meara, a Liverpool docker. She was 30 and he was 37. Mary may well have fallen in love, but the marriage made economic sense too. Although she had worked since girlhood, she earned only 12 shillings a week – just above the average women’s wage at the turn of the century, but not really enough for her to live comfortably on her own ...”

“... party. If there is little that resembles a distinctly northern civil society (though this may be changing), neither is there much sign of an ‘official North’ as constructed by the state. What does exist is ‘no more than a caprice of the Whitehall mind’, its boundaries flowing around a series of ill-fated ministries and schemes. The North has ...”

“... to write up a pretty good ‘pastiche of [his guests’] conversational style’. History may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s ...”

“... in the Dirty Realist era of short fiction, his work was mostly out of print again.His realism may not be quite as dirty as Raymond Carver’s but the title story of The Hurly Burly encapsulates what’s enduring about Coppard. Split into three sections over twelve pages, it’s centred on Phemy, ‘a charity girl taken from the workhouse’, who at 21 is ...”

“... can never do justice to the object; it is foreign to it, as if indifferent. But the unknown name may also hurl us into a world of ideas and images … where we encounter things wondrous and strange and come back full of them.’ In November 1927, Magritte went a step further with his ‘metamorphosis’ paintings, which show ‘an object merging into an ...”

“... and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite phrases’ allegedly used by Defoe. In extreme cases these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be ...”

“... as nothing could be put to the vote of the Regent House (i.e. the whole body of dons) between mid-May and mid-October, one had to be pretty nippy to get a proposal brought to a vote before the year was out. Oxford took the Robbins criticisms to heart and in 1964 set up a commission of inquiry under Oliver Franks. Franks took evidence in open session and was ...”

“... and steel. He had warned the Labour Government that ‘by standing aside form the discussions, we may be taking a very great risk with our economy – a very great risk indeed.’ He had pointed out how important it was to be in at the formative stages, when the structure could be moulded. ‘Now we may be left with the ...”

“... that amounts almost to a rewrite of history. Cogent though Brown’s facts and Lloyd’s rhetoric may be, both authors show a fatal eagerness to please. How odd it is that a decade of Thatcher has not taught Labourites the essential distinction between being liked and being respected. The Prime Minister has demonstrated a willingness to take life and to risk ...”

“... to its adherents, it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is ...”