“... only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished ...”

“... humiliation (‘but actually I don’t really care because it is only the beginning and it may be necessary to fight this battle year after year’). As it turned out, it verged on a triumph for Benn, since Healey’s margin over him in the electoral college was, as he justifiably put it, ‘an absolute whisker’s difference’. But this, as it turned ...”

“... documentation, which they concealed down a mineshaft while they bargained for their future. On 2 May, they surrendered to the Americans in Bavaria. A decade of American dithering followed. When the Russians put up Sputnik 1 in 1957, the message went direct to the Pentagon and the White House: ‘they’ had something that could carry a nuclear warhead to ...”

“... and Jinmium stone circles in the Kimberley (40,000 BCE), however their datings and meanings may be contested, have entered the Australian imagination, intensifying the almost redemptive durability with which Aboriginal culture taunts settler society. The tourist industry has been quick to promote primordial Aboriginality as the major cultural attraction ...”

“... and acting in Character of a prudish Lady, he said: ‘Well, I don’t know what to think; Women may be honest that do such things, but for my Part I never could bear to touch any Man’s Flesh – except my Husband’s, whom perhaps,’ says he, ‘she wish’d at the Devil.’ Swift’s fleshly remarks are doubly ironic, considering the later sexual ...”

“... is a damning analysis of commercialisation.1 His story starts at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on 18 May 1992, when Sky Sports was in competition with Greg Dyke of ITV for the Premiership rights. ITV are said to have put up £262 million for five years, a deal which favoured the ‘big five’ clubs, who were guaranteed exposure. Alan Sugar, one of several ...”

“... Merle Haggard’s 1969 song ‘Okie from Muskogee’. During the Nixon era the political dialogue may have been between plain folks content to play football and drink white lightning and ‘those hippies in San Francisco’, growing their hair long, smoking dope and burning their draft cards. But in the Thirties the American flag was not something liberals ...”

“... Bill Clinton, then a leading congressman and finally Obama’s chief of staff. Some felt that he may have been headed for the White House in his own right. But he has no regrets. Who would want to be president these days? He thinks the federal government is where good ideas go to die. Cities like Chicago are where it’s at. It just takes mayors like him to ...”

“... 91 per cent had at least one pre-existing condition; on average they had 2.7. The numbers may change, but at that point the background risk of mortality for patients in their seventies with this number of pre-existing conditions was greater than the risk associated with Covid-19: the latter is estimated by the Imperial team as 5.1 per cent, while the ...”

“... Sainte-Beuve’, more in connection with him than about him. The difference seems slight, but it may matter.Throughout his introduction, a wonderful piece of critical writing in itself, de Fallois keeps looking for the right phrase to describe the material he has assembled. ‘This is not an essay or a novel,’ he says. ‘It is a work.’ He also calls it ...”

“... that ‘light in the wrong place can be a poison, that she felt quite at home in the dark’.There may be a storyline for darkness, or for giving dimension to the dark, but what is the storyline for drift? Checkout 19 has a plot of sorts. There are hints early on of devastation in the narrator’s family life. She shares a joke with her mother during ‘one of ...”

“... liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When Manchette began writing crime novels in the late 1960s, the polar (a slangy truncation of roman policier) was a straightforward procedural, spiced up with tales of small-time gangster lowlife. He took ...”

“... and nasty as his fish – Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the Play-club: There, sweepings do as well As the best-ordered meal.By the time Jonson wrote these lines, Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre – or, as almost everyone now agrees, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, co-written by Shakespeare and the ...”

“... that I contemplate Germany and my plans for the future there,’ he wrote to Liszt in 1860. ‘May God forgive me, but all I can see in Germany is small-mindedness, boorish behaviour, pretence and arrogance … If I am a German, it is because Germany lives within me.’ He was, in turn, deplored by some on the radical right, including the ferocious ...”

“... of fellow, a rugby blue who was known to call his wife by the name of George’. These teachers may look formidable in their black gowns but they’re kindly enough, insisting on the spirit of fairness. Of course, as McEwan is keen to let his younger readers know, corporal punishment still took place in this era, and ‘the honourable thing was to take your ...”