“... well with a doomed last stand. Figures for wounded civilians in Mosul over the last three months may well exceed those for East Aleppo over the same period. This is partly because ten times as many people have been caught up in the fighting in Mosul, whose population according to the UN is 1.2 million; 116,000 civilians were evacuated from East Aleppo. Of ...”

“... lately because his recent memoirs, Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), may startle fans of his writing with their formlessness and clutter, ham-handed lyricism and epic egotism. My fear, picking up 4321, was that it had been written by the imprudent, tone-deaf Auster of those two books, rather than by the one I reluctantly, thornily ...”

“... roistering virility, and made it his mission to bring it back. This fixation on manliness may have had something to do with a lurking uncertainty about his own sexuality, dating from his childhood. He wrote in his autobiography of ‘the disgrace of my schooldays [that] has clung to me all through life’ and linked it to his failure to earn the ...”

“... the edge into madness, but this is rather like claiming that winning the Republican nomination may have pushed Donald Trump over the edge into egoism. It cannot, however, have helped, not least because the earl was a man with a keen sense of his own social position, easily offended if others seemed less than respectful of his title. If Portsmouth were to ...”

“... almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar exploration (I May Be Some Time, 1996), a memoir of childhood reading (The Child that Books Built, 2002), a study of various unsung successes of postwar British science (Backroom Boys, 2003) and a non-fiction novel that unpacks the story of Soviet economics (Red ...”

“... by the overseas deputies, including Senghor, but rejected by the French in a referendum in May 1946.The following month, the Communists lost their dominant position in the Assembly, pro-colonial and settler interests regrouped, and De Gaulle publicly stated his opposition to a federalist union that would compromise metropolitan power and authority. The ...”

“... safeguards a new Massanello might arise, who, ‘laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented … and may sweep away the liberties of the continent’. Paine was referring to a 17th-century Neapolitan fisherman who had roused the masses to seize control of the ...”

“... spelling question, expecting to be asked to puff out my cheeks or wiggle my eyebrows. The tumour may or may not have found its way into functionally useful tissue. In order to decide how best to treat it, the doctors would have to find out why I’d got the spelling question wrong. Until the 1960s, ‘Are you left-handed ...”

“... of course he is, as we all are) but that narration by one person of their own life may well be impossible. Lerner doesn’t just tear down the curtain between the writer and reader, as in his previous books, but allows the reader to flicker between the first and third person, to see a boy’s sentimental education as dynamic, resolving one ...”

“... stomach as Wollstonecraft’s attribution of all such claims and arguments to a divine being. She may have stopped attending church in her twenties, but she never lost her belief in God; her religion was, in Godwin’s words, ‘almost entirely of her own creation. But she was not on that account less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what ...”

“... is impeachment.The constitution provides that a majority of the House of Representatives may impeach (that is, indict) the president for ‘treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours’. A trial then takes place in the Senate, where conviction and removal requires a two-thirds vote. As on numerous other matters, the constitution is ...”

“... either through a sheer absence of acclaim, or through outbursts of denunciation, which other users may in turn wish to ‘like’ or share.The radical difference between the infrastructure overseen by Mark Zuckerberg today and the one rolled out by George Gallup in the 1930s is that we can all now potentially act as the pollster. Here’s my dog: like or ...”

“... face a likely truth of helplessness – that the inflated will to/gauge and skewer each wrong turn may blank out what’s far worse/to bear: impersonal hazard, the humiliating lack of much control –/I don’t get past this thought with any confidence.(‘Seven Strangely Exciting Lies’)Riley has written almost as many books on feminism, motherhood and ...”

“... Word that you are, that wounds you, bores you or carries you away.’ In this language we may hear something of the young girl’s father, disobeyed in the letter but followed in the spirit. Who could resist the destructive and the demonic? Though I’m not sure about the clinging.Kristeva likes apparent contradictions, though hers aren’t as unruly ...”

“... the means.Prospecting a hundred years, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘The London citizen of the year 2000 AD may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of ...”