“... and compulsory purchase legislation is archaic and complex,’ says a leaflet produced by Knight Frank, the property consultancy on the scheme. Unfathomable would be a better way of putting it. In France, the state buys homes at full market price in a band of 150 metres on either side of land affected by a scheme of national importance, but in the UK only ...”

“... the Algerian war), was put in charge only to be shown the door a few months later. Stora, nowadays close to the Socialist Party, was a good choice for the Ministry of Culture if they were to provide funding, which seemed to be the plan. But he didn’t suit the mayor of Aix, an eccentric figure on the right of the UMP who has no qualms about electoral ...”

“... friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted introduction, the editors of the Letters excuse this by claiming that ‘bragging isn’t really “bragging” when it’s so manifestly a ...”

“... of freedom throughout the world.’ As the ticker-tape begins to twirl down on the stage, you see Frank Sinatra beaming from the crowd (he never got over John Kennedy’s snubbing him in favour of Bing Crosby in 1962), and, off to stage right, a slightly out of control and overexcited person in a tan suit, the vice-presidential nominee’s son George. There ...”

“... use of Ecstasy on the same plane as evocations of Whistler’s brushwork, Henry James’s prose or Frank Lloyd Wright’s way with a building. This was a sensibility that seemed not to recognise a separation between high and low, past and present, glory and disgrace. The immediate context for the disruption of The Stranger’s Child was that Hollinghurst had ...”

“... no Ricky, she said.Ricky was worse, the beam said.Well, she said. If you knew Ricky.That’s as close as we come to the reality that has stung him into writing this story: we do love our Rickys, even though they are worse.‘The Mom of Bold Action’ is one of those stories, which have appeared from time to time since In Persuasion Nation (2006), that ...”

“... movies out like sausages, and it turned out to be a very good idea: the assembly-line concept,’ Frank Capra said. ‘They weren’t our films then. They were called our “product”.’Just as the geriatric jamboree of silent filmmakers starts to lose steam, Jeanine Basinger intrudes herself like an anxious hostess into the conversation and into ...”

“... its long aftermath. In response he passed not just a major cyclical stimulus, but also the Dodd-Frank Act, to regulate finance, and Obamacare, the single most significant domestic policy reform in decades. But Obama was enough of a man of the 1990s to believe that crisis was temporary and normality was just that, the norm. It would return.That assumption ...”

“... rewards of their villainy are scant, the fences with whom they deal miserly and the police always close behind. At the end of the first series, Bunny is sent to prison and Raffles apparently drowns at sea, only to surface again in the next series, but living in hiding disguised as an elderly invalid – a disguise that completely fools Bunny, as Raffles’s ...”

“... with English humanists’ – who therefore speak through Claudius’s rebuke to Hamlet for the frank wastefulness, the sheer childishness, of his grief for his dead father. Indeed, formally most Tudor writers themselves spoke with him, apologising for what they tended to throw away (like Puttenham) as ‘but the studie of my yonger yeares in which vanitie ...”

“... must be broad enough not to be easily bridged or quickly cut through, must be under the close fire of the defence, and near enough to be effectively watched by night. The near edge of the entanglement should be about 20 yards from the trench, and it should be at least 10 yards broad ... It may sometimes be useful to construct a second belt of wire ...”

“... Nazi abbreviation of Konzentrationslager. Wachsmann’s book is a world-making history: from the close observations of individual lives and moments, and of historical forces great and small, his subject emerges. It is no ordinary world. ‘There are times when history is let off the leash,’ the Polish academic Jan Kott remembered one of his teachers saying ...”

“... global warming-related item on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two: close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney ‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a ...”

“... than her Life of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are ...”

“... the summer of 1762 he found himself caught in the cross-currents of politics. William Burke, his close friend and possibly a distant relative, was busy canvassing merchant interests in an attempt to whip up opposition to the peace treaty about to be signed with France and Spain. Edmund joined in, declaring that the treaty was ‘the most shameful that ever ...”