“... range of hearing that is present in otherwise normally functioning ears. People with hyperacusis may find that certain sounds are more difficult to listen to than others, and some sounds may cause pain in the ears, even when those sounds don’t bother others. Often, the most disturbing or painful sounds can be sudden ...”

“... juxtaposition between a dying woman and her undying cells, and retells the fable. Rebecca Skloot may be just the latest in a long line, but The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks will surely stand as the definitive account. There’s no simple moral to the tale, but the book shows how even the best intentions may be warped ...”

“... conflict under control thanks to his own prestige and irreplaceability. This was not as easy as it may look in retrospect. Not the least problem was Stalin, always suspicious of those beyond his reach, who in 1951 proposed to kick Togliatti upstairs to head the new Cominform, the Communist Information Bureau, far from Italy. Probably he had in mind a more ...”

“... given specialism. It is, of course, Bragg himself who manages this by standing proxy for us: he may well have read widely on the given subject of the week, but he chivvies away at the crusty academics until they become dehiscent and disgorge their generative pellets of knowledge. On a recent voyage around A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he asked ...”

“... all for authenticity but it can’t begin to hold a candle to the human gift for playacting. That may be the only authentic thing we ever do.’) When the narrative valency of a novel is low or obscure, the term ‘meditation’ is often bestowed on it, lowered like a calming hand onto our brow (‘Oh, so that’s what that sense of aimlessness is – it’s ...”

“... by reference to his youth, being imposed on his rule. He therefore had to start all over again. In May 1389, aged 22, he declared that he was an adult and intended to rule as one. In practice, Fletcher argues, what emerged in the next few years was a consensual regime that accepted and performed ‘Richard’s manhood through the household hospitality and ...”

“... the lethally effective ‘invisible war’ waged against Iraqi civilians between August 1990 and May 2003 with the full authority of the United Nations and the tireless attention of the US and British governments. As an example of carefully crafted callousness this story offers a close parallel to Britain’s German exercise. In both cases, sanctions were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism. In the European elections of May 2014, with a tiny, crowd-funded budget and just four months of existence, it gained 1.2 million votes and five MEPs. By the end of the year it led the two establishment parties in the polls. The roots of Podemos lie in the huge 2011 indignados protests ...”

“... Ischia, Lenù writes letter after letter to Lila, and gets only one back, at the end of August. It may as well be the platonic letter. ‘The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I ...”

“... real, current 37 follows a South London route, between Putney Heath and Peckham.) The number may also have something to do with Leah’s biological clock. Her husband Michel wants children, but she doesn’t. The couple met in Ibiza in ‘the Nineties, ecstatic decade!’ and their faded hedonism makes Leah nostalgic. Michel is West African via France, a ...”

“... optimism and threw herself into bolstering the confidence of her husband and of the country. In May 1939 Bertie, now George VI, became the first British monarch to visit the United States, on a tour intended to pave the way for a future alliance against Germany. There is a glimpse of the extremes the new queen was attempting to draw together in a letter ...”

“... into its final stages, as the last few members are awakened and the brethren assemble. All of this may sound pretty silly, and it is. Readers who make it through the 700-odd pages of the trilogy may wonder why they persevered for so long with the fantasy. Ice evokes the everyday details of the post-Soviet world: the imported ...”

“... is an ambiguous compliment, but it does point to the mental energies that lost or trapped people may find for themselves. Nonsense, Peake said, ‘is not the opposite of good sense … It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything.’ Whenever poems and songs appear in the Gormenghast novels, which is often, they are invariably of the ...”