“... neighbour’s hair tickled your nostril, his foot was on your foot and, sometimes, over-poweringly close, was the pressure and scent of the female: a woman would be wedged tightly against him, a breast squashed against his arm, or buttocks pressing into his groin. He would keep his eyes lowered and his body as detached as possible. But it was difficult. And ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... and duplicity. How much they know now; how little they knew before. What is astonishing is how close Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond have come to keeping their secret. If you trace Madame Merle’s emotional position in the novel rather than Isabel’s, the movement of her feeling is as interesting and as intense. It is ...”

“... of life scarcely settles the question. An anti-Muslim alarmist and advocate of multiple wars like Frank Gaffney can think that Trump is on his side. So, with as much reason, can an anti-interventionist like Buchanan. Events will not allow Trump to profit much longer from this calculated ambiguity. Besides, the deeper danger of his populism, as Jan-Werner ...”

“... Now’, ‘Jitterbug Waltz’ and ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’, he still couldn’t have come close to satisfying the demands placed on him by his own success and the executives at RCA Victor.Waller’s band could readily produce great lyrical, instrumental recordings – ‘Blue Turning Grey over You’ (1937), for instance, Gene Sedric playing the alto ...”

“... 2014 and in Jennifer Croft’s English translation in 2021. The figure at the heart of it, Jacob Frank, called by some ‘the Jewish Luther’ and by others ‘the false messiah’, is drawn from historical fact. Born in a muddy corner of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1726, he travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire as a merchant, living among the ...”

“... dealings with the church: ‘My relationship with the church was excellent. It was very cordial, frank and open.’ During the dictatorship, Admiral Massera played tennis with the papal nuncio, Pio Laghi, once a fortnight. It was arranged for Massera to have an audience with Pope Paul VI on a visit to Rome in 1977. In the same year, he was invited to give a ...”

“... bunk built along the wall opposite the desk, with a pair of beige curtains running across it to close it off from the rest of the cabin. The bedding, to my delight, was all white. Opposite the door was a large rectangular window – porthole, if you must – which opened wide. Nothing else.While the Vavilov’s engines got up to speed, I lay myself down on ...”

“... The lawyer and politician Isaac Butt had been a college classmate of his father’s and remained a close friend, close enough for John Butler Yeats’s father to call his youngest son Isaac Butt Yeats. Among Yeats’s best friends at school were two brothers from Sligo, Charles and George Pollexfen, whose family owned a ...”

“... movements as ‘characters’ in some of his fiction. How is this to be reconciled with the frank dominance of a single character – a male narrator – in each of the novels since Breakfast of Champions? Shortly after the author, as a character in this novel, has uttered his resolve to make every person exactly as important as any other he hears a ...”

“... over Gussie Bethell as evidence of his being ‘on the rebound’ (‘he had never really got over Frank’), yet when the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò flees from the Lady Jingly Jones after she has rejected his proposal of marriage, it’s possible that he’s on the rebound in the opposite direction. He whispers sweet nothings to a large and lively turtle: ‘You’re ...”

“... said, as he turned the Shenandoah Valley into a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads. Frank Vizetelly was in the neighbourhood, reporting and drawing (as he had been throughout the war) for the Illustrated London News. ‘The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of ...”

“... tried it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room somewhere; it would cost ...”

“... secretive. On the other, he does not want us to set any store by such observations. He is also frank about his role as a maker who touches things up: he is obviously painting a romantic ‘portrait’. The same unnamed narrator praises the candour of Pechorin’s diaries (‘this man who so relentlessly displayed his personal weakness and defects for all ...”

“... Cream for firming the neck and bust’. Arden’s own salons were taking off, as women watched close-ups of heavily made-up stars in the cinema and decided, helped by advertising in glossy magazines and brilliant public relations, that the ‘mark of sex and sin’ was worth the price. By 1927 American women were buying 52,000 tons of cleansing ...”