“... nursing her mother, who suffered a stroke a year after her father died. The habit of reclusiveness may even have begun, Gordon hypothesises, with a wish to imitate the young Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Whatever its origin, Dickinson’s eccentric conduct made her – or the idea of her – conspicuous. As Richard Chase put it in his 1951 study, ‘She receded ...”

“... The killing of the girl is strictly revolting, and no less so for being kept out of view; Haneke may refrain from graphic violence, may switch to Benny’s oblique video of the scene, but the girl’s screams alone are upsetting in the extreme. Haneke has little apparent sense of humour, but he has an appalled sense of ...”

“... of this kind is the other reason it was a big mistake to think the South was Fascist. It may have been a one-party state, but the Democrats were not a one-state party. Southern Democrats didn’t have a single leader; theirs, as Katznelson says, was a ‘chaotic and anarchic’ organisation, riddled with local variations. More important, it was an ...”

“... Moneyball has something of the flavour of New Labour. The obsession with targets and statistics may start out as a way of effecting meaningful changes, as a means to an end, but it’s hard to prevent the targets themselves from becoming the point. Beane’s approach to managing the Oakland A’s involved bypassing the traditional experts (the club’s ...”

“... to a better way of life? What right have you to condemn them to a primitive life? … The Penans may tell you that … is what they like. That is because they are not able to live a better life like the other tribes in Sarawak … Stop being arrogant and thinking that it is the white man’s burden to decide the fate of the peoples in this world. As the ...”

“... the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff for nearly a decade. What he felt about Philby’s betrayal may only be imagined because he kept his thoughts to himself and rarely – perhaps never – mentioned Philby’s name again. Morley​ tells the Philby story in both his books, and he tells it well. But he makes no serious attempt to weigh its full impact on ...”

“... self-absorbed character in the book but also the hardest on herself. As far as literature goes she may have joyfully let her analytical skills go after her last exam, but she has her own shrewd sense of things, and of the change that attended the end of her formal education. ‘Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame ...”

“... making the poem. You certainly couldn’t get further from the sentiment of Yeats – ‘A line may take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught’ – or Hardy’s remark that he wouldn’t think of taking a poem through more than four drafts for fear it might lose its freshness: early ...”

“... Party scored only 20.5 per cent – a defeat of historic proportions. The European elections on 26 May delivered an even more crushing blow, as the SPD collapsed to only 15.8 per cent. In current polls the party is trailing in fourth place with barely more than 10 per cent of the popular vote. Twenty years ago, in their last decisive electoral victory, they ...”

“... over and that of Gramscism is beginning. I hope she is right. However, her own example suggests it may not be so easy to break free from the great webs of Ecole Normale library-paste and intellectual terrorism. The same is true of the Buci-Glucksmann and Sassoon volumes. Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s study, especially, can be seen as a mighty struggle for its ...”

“... Waldeck-Rochet (until, in practice, 1970) and Georges Marchais. The meeting at Argenteuil may well have been held, not to settle questions of Party philosophy, but to bring the intellectuals into line, in what R.W. Johnson, in his new book, has picturesquely called ‘the long march of the French Left’, culminating in the Communist-Socialist ...”

“... of Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), battered rugby league player Arthur Machin makes what may or may not be his final appearance on the pitch. Knowing that for him the ‘game’ (in more than a sporting sense) is up, he looks beyond its claustrophobic mayhem at the ‘life’ not yet ‘absorbed’ into it: at ...”

“... do more efficiently himself.Which isn’t to say that there weren’t mishaps. In 2018, Musk may have produced the most expensive social media post of all time when he tweeted ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured’ – a joke that made Tesla shares jump 11 per cent before traders realised that he wasn’t in earnest. The ...”

“... of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which he had borrowed from Athens. At its peak, the library may have contained as many as 750,000 volumes. A tiny fraction of them survive today.The first two Ptolemies established the Ptolemaic dynasty, but the third secured its legacy in this life and the next. In 238 bce, Ptolemy III and his wife, Berenike II, were ...”

“... the Bluff Cove disaster came about, while Admiral Woodward – whose hair is not red but brown – may feel hard done by in the chapters about squabbles among Task Force commanders. But The Falklands War conveys well the driving impatience, the rivalry for chances of martial glory, which possessed many politicians and officers and which, on several ...”