“... once it was bandaged up by a prison officer. She felt, she said, like a craftsman. It may not have been quite what she intended – it looked ‘as if half my chest had been hacked open’ – but it did the job. She was transferred from the hospital wing to the main prison, where she felt she belonged. The puzzle of Lady Constance Lytton’s life ...”

“... on an upbeat note, suggesting that uprisings among workers at Walmart and other low-wage retailers may ‘break through the ossified remains of the old trade-union apparatus and seed the growth of wholly new organisations of the invisibles’. People are still inspired not only by material wants but also by ‘ineffable yearnings to redefine what it means to ...”

“... lives in a miniature castle in Walworth, ‘middle class’, adding that ‘his fellow gardeners may well have been working class.’ Dickens places him nicely as an aspirant. His portable property and garden ‘estate’ separates his home and his Aged Parent from the sordid world of work but also from his fellow Londoners. Willes assumes that most women ...”

“... without manufactured intimacy, where boundaries are respected but trust can be built. The people may be abrupt, but they’re not phoney. The gay women who run the Moonstone had assumed that brusque Cissy, who didn’t so much apply for a job cleaning the rooms as let them know how much they should pay her and when she would start, disapproved of their ...”

“... sense of futility and failure,’ Wilson speculates ominously at the beginning of her account, ‘may have been partly his father’s unintentional doing.’ Thomas was certainly to grow up with very little sense of his own capacity for intentional doing of any sort at all. Wilson makes it plain that Thomas got a great deal from his father, the great deal he ...”

“... shop replied curtly: ‘We don’t sell that kind of thing.’ I was ashamed to have asked, and may even have muttered something about its being for a friend in Paris, or some other implausible excuse. I eventually bought a copy in Abbeville, some twenty minutes’ drive away. For a long time, however, whenever anyone asked about my work, or if the ...”

“... In some respects, Cliff’s book has been overtaken by events. He imagines a day when Beijing may attempt to use its new muscle to alter the balance of power in the South China Sea. Since the book was published this has begun to happen: China has built artificial islands in areas of the sea contested by Vietnam and the Philippines, and equipped them for ...”

“... unreliable narrator on your hands – ‘I have always liked stunts (and also, as you may have guessed, pranks, hoaxes, games)’ – is the literary equivalent of discovering that you have invited a kleptomaniac into your home. In fact the ‘lie’ about filmmaking in upstate New York is close to what really happened, though there wasn’t a ...”

“... temporary safety’. According to Hayden, we must also consider the number of innocent people who may be killed in a future terrorist attack. ‘What might be admirable for a court system is unconscionable for an intelligence agency,’ he writes. Hayden was appointed to lead the National Security Agency in 1999 by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up ...”

“... is quite hard at the moment. She has received a sympathetic biography by Peter Conradi, which may be too kind to her, and a sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press ...”

“... there was a spouse who had seen this mark as recently as this morning. I imagined her (you may think me presumptuous to assume that his spouse was a woman, given my own particular circumstances, but there was something in his demeanour that suggested to me that he had never touched a man without anger or force or anxiety, and even now he touched the ...”

“... transform his critical reputation, as his admirers believe is his due? The contributors to Will May’s volume have had access to Prince’s papers, which became available on the centenary of his birth in 2012, and many of them quote fascinating material culled from this archive. His poetry is approached from all sorts of angles: we get Derek Attridge on ...”

“... of what he recorded Hitler as having told him was invented or copied from other sources. There may be some accurate reporting in his book, but it is so mixed up with Rauschning’s own subjective representation of Nazism that it’s now virtually impossible to identify. Kurlander is of course aware of all this, but he still uses Rauschning when it suits ...”

“... secure his precious three votes. In the end, South Africa won the final bidding round 14-10, so we may infer that the trip was a success. But subsequent rumours that $10 million also found its way from South Africa to Trinidad may have had something to do with it. As David Conn writes in his exemplary history of recent high ...”

“... alchemy or his interests in astrology, numerology and biblical prophecy. Whatever madness may have crept into his method (possibly a result of mercury poisoning), natural philosophy had different boundaries to modern science, encompassing – or porous to – the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most ...”