“... omissions. It didn’t include Norton’s favourite pink dressing gown, for example, though that may have been among the clothes in the trunk sent to Aunt Joyce.Elisabeth’s granddaughter, Lulah Ellender, has decided to tell the story of Elisabeth’s life through the lists she kept between the years 1939 and 1957. Ellender never knew her grandmother: she ...”

“... when she won – these reviews are the literary equivalent. A profile with the title ‘Why Now May (Finally) Be Meg Wolitzer’s Moment’ seemed to forget that this is a New York Times-bestselling author who has had three novels adapted for film and television, including one directed by her mentor Nora Ephron (The Female Persuasion has just been ...”

“... cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read. HMP Holloway, which was the largest women’s prison in Western Europe at its closure in 2016, at first held 120 men and 27 women, as well as a number of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at once over and underperform to an extent that other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a performance: it is ‘both a wonder and a trick’, she argues, in a formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are performances that elicit ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pamphlets and brochures – even the buttons in the lift! – are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths … I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no one else is using anyway, just so for once they can have something just ...”

“... was the more forceful personality, but the London organisation yielded the early results: May the Twelfth, a collage of reported impressions of Britain on the day of George VI’s coronation, and Britain: By Mass-Observation, a compilation of reactions to the Munich crisis, which was published by Penguin in January 1939 and sold 100,000 copies in ten ...”

“... Mayakovsky, called it ‘uncreative’. Lunacharsky and Pasternak were right, though Lenin may have been exaggerating. The rebellious, grandiose ‘I’ was the centre of Mayakovsky’s poetic universe, the logic of his style; without it, his poems were unmoored. His political rhetoric was most effective when subordinated to a larger emotion. ‘The ...”

“... confident summation has a free-market triumphalism that, like Fukuyama’s End of History, may not stand the test of time, but it reflects the negative verdict of much current writing on the Russian Revolution: It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a theory of history the revolution tested ...”

“... and former employee Alexander von Hübner came to visit the 86-year-old former statesman late in May 1859, only a week before his death, Metternich summed up his own career in politics: ‘I was a rock of order’ – ‘un rocher d’ordre’.Before order could be established, peace had to be achieved. Between 1792 and 1815, Europe experienced war on an ...”

“... to physical size. I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly 17 stone … In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the most densely populated places on earth. Though it is part of the Marshall Islands, Marshallese may only live on Kwajalein with the permission of the US army. The relationship between Kwajalein and Ebeye mirrors South Africa’s apartheid pass system: Ebeye’s residents are allowed onto Kwajalein only to work and must leave every day after their shift ...”

“... 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 ...”