“... in for Aglietta’s absent sovereign power. On every occasion that panic came to a head – in May and November 2010 with the Greek and Irish bailouts; summer 2011 with tremors over Spanish and Italian bonds; November and December 2011 with the ousting of Papandreou and Berlusconi, followed by Cameron’s veto of the Fiscal Compact treaty; and summer 2012 ...”

“... it was exactly this quality of noble withholding that she sought to achieve. Cather’s preference may have been shaped by emotional identification. Unlike Bernhardt, whose love affairs were notorious, the real-life Duse seemed to have no husband and no friends: ‘She is utterly alone upon the icy heights where other beings cannot live.’ ‘Cather was only ...”

“... Bouchet, came from.He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, in a residential suburb of Lausanne, on 22 May 1887, the second son of a well-to-do Anglo-Irish gentleman, Otho Holland Lloyd, and a former governess, Clara ‘Nellie’ Hutchinson, whose origins are obscure but who was certainly born illegitimate. They were married in 1884, just a month after Otho’s ...”

“... all right, you also say you were proud of such a father, a father with a fine physique ... And may I remind you that father was taking the trouble and time, the few hours he could get away from the business, to try and make something of that nebisch, develop his muscles, put some flesh on those poor little bones so he would grow up sturdy? But even before ...”

“... told that he needed an operation, and given six months’ leave. The family was back in London by May. That month, Japanese demands on the CMC came to a head. Japan had not formally declared war on China, and still had to reckon with the other imperialist powers in the region. Although Tokyo now controlled both Shanghai and Nanking, the Customs could not be ...”

“... whether he was Albanian or not. We had spent two hours with a family who had fled to the hills in May when their house was destroyed, come home in June and spent the summer rebuilding, only to see it all reduced to rubble in September – and this time one sister killed by shelling. The mother is seriously depressed and they all sit aimlessly on ...”

“... only after a tirade of anti-semitic remarks and character assassination. ‘However foolish one may wish to call this … to maintain my own integrity I thought it indispensable to claim to the last all the rights available to me under the law,’ he wrote in his memoirs. Arrested again in 1935 and sent to Dachau, he emerged in 1937 with plans to sue the ...”

“... I suppose a cork-lined carriage. The ‘Marcel Proust’ might be a good name for a train. 16 May. Philip Roth’s face in a photograph by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows how to restore or ...”

“... on the quality of life. It’s partly that the men, in particular, can be so insanely boring. That may reflect the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. David Kynaston, author of a magisterial four-volume history of the City, completed in 2001, observes at the start of the fourth volume that ‘the modern ...”

“... or the Iraq war that they were waiting there to be ‘discovered’. ‘Something of that sort’ may well have come into being, but an example of ‘something like’ Figaro is Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus or even Abba’s ‘Waterloo’. You don’t necessarily have to construct counter-factual histories to support this sort of sensibility. Scientists are ...”

“... about anything, asking questions like ‘what was the First World War all about?’, but this may have been a game. He was the first member of his family to go to college. Normally, in the words of a neighbour, ‘you graduated from high school and you went to the mill.’ Warhol went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study art. He ...”

“... might be, always modest. She might be ill, disturbed, mad even, but she still knew her place. It may be objected that madness did not come into it; that, as Mr Parr had said, this was depression and a very different thing. But though we clung to this assurance it was hard not to think her delusions mad and the tenacity with which she held to them, defended ...”

“... was including the study of the super-normal in her reading; her attendance at séances in London may have begun as early as the previous year. Soon she became interested in astrology. Her study was as serious and systematic as circumstances would allow, helped by an ambitious mother and a private income, and a knowledge of Italian and Latin. She was a ...”

“... Ronald Firbank​ died on 21 May 1926, of pneumonia, in the Hotel Quirinale in Rome. He had lived alone for much of his adult life, and it seems likely that he died alone too – he had sent away the nurse who had been engaged to look after him. This detail comes from the only published account of the circumstances, by Lord Berners, who considered himself Firbank’s ‘only friend in Rome at the time ...”

“... your own wants). No space for the desire for the destiny of this child to have been different that may be present even in necessary abortions. And what if you aren’t a good storyteller? As a late-term abortion provider in the US documentary film After Tiller (2013) asks, ‘Why would it be OK for me to say, “No, you’ve got to tell me a better story than ...”