“... as one might expect. In 1853 he explained it to – of all people – his lover Louise Colet: It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded ...”

“... advice not to dance with Mr Darcy by saying, with evident sincerity: ‘I believe, ma’am, I may safely promise you never to dance with him.’ And we know where that leads. Nothing intrigues Austen more than self-deception. She is the most psychologically plausible of novelists largely because her characters’ dialogue is everywhere inflected by their ...”

“... live more honestly through language … The notion of “finding your voice”, simplistic as it may sound, is … a social goal.’ Thus, presumably, the genesis of Outline. The narrator, a writer, travels to Athens to teach at a creative writing workshop. She meets people, they talk to her, sometimes she offers an observation, and that’s it. A frame is ...”

“... film, Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919). In the greater world, her most lasting achievement may be that she invented and popularised the practice of painting toenails red. (Adolphe Menjou thought her feet were bleeding.) She remains an exemplary character, a test case for understanding how fame and cinema work. She was born​ on 3 January 1897 in ...”

“... official prisons do not, he claims, have the space to accommodate tens of thousands of people. He may be right. Yet imprisoned they have been. So where are they? Having interviewed lawyers, psychologists and former detainees, I have learned the names of sites where torture and ill-treatment are far worse than anything in the official prisons. Inside ...”

“... George VI​ was crowned on 12 May 1937, a hundred years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court ...”

“... by their theologically eccentric father to visit whatever houses of worship they pleased, they may have been stumped when their contemporaries demanded to know what church they attended, but the young Henry’s sense that there was something vaguely discrediting about not being able to say where they ‘went’ was more than offset by his delight in the ...”

“... believe me … I would bomb the shit out of them.’The Non-Violent Trump (at a rally): ‘There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.’Gold Star Mothers Gold Star ...”

“... suffered their first serious reversal when they were halted by the Red Army before Moscow. In May 1942 the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne inaugurated nearly two years of mass destruction of Germany’s towns and cities. Just under a year later came the catastrophe of Stalingrad, where the remnants of the German 6th Army were forced to surrender in ...”

“... electronic music in particular. ‘Only through the use of electrical means,’ he writes, ‘may important advances in the exploration of sound be made’: ‘American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the co-operation of scientists with a real appreciation ...”

“... are not local and temporary, but are universal, permanent, contagious and indiscriminate.It may seem odd that this kind of emotional and visceral experience can be prompted by a poetry more usually accused of being merely literary, cerebral, philosophical – but it can. Thornton’s description rings truest for passages like this: Dental roof in spasm ...”

“... it was named, was meant to show how education might one day be conducted across the continent. ‘May the Europe of the European schools definitively take the place of the Europe of the war cemeteries,’ René Mayer, the head of the ECSC, declared when the building, which took the form of a giant E, was officially opened on 11 December 1957. As the number of ...”

“... gave the novel its original title in French, Dans le jardin de l’ogre, and awkward though it may be, it conveys the novel’s atmosphere of danger and debasement. The English title feels like a compromise reached after a long editorial meeting in which no one could agree on what the novel was actually about. This is not the first time Slimani’s titles ...”

“... of the Portraits show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was something he knew well. ‘Cézanne has no more interest in a face than in an apple, and both have no value in his eyes other ...”

“... people are determined to possess it, very often with just as great a determination that others may not possess it – and that possessiveness extends to its past. Even to name this land is fraught with pitfalls. An easy choice would be to call it ‘the Holy Land’, but some may think that evasive, and when I have used ...”