“... 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 ...”

“... joined together in a larger whole, under a leader who can claim to speak for all of them, Labour may be finished as an electoral force. That, though, raises a bigger question. Is democratic micro-entanglement consistent with wanting to win elections? Glasman, along with almost every other contributor to this volume, assumes that Blue Labour is a way of ...”

“... cliché. Rosenbaum writes, for example, that ‘the Victorian essence of the Frys’ family life may be conveyed by the fact that none of his six sisters married’ without pausing to consider how lifelong spinsters and large families can both characterise the ‘essence’ of Victorianism. Writing in 1928 about Macaulay, Strachey gave a better sense of his ...”

“... that’s what it means.’ Of all the rescues that the novel proposes, the most difficult may be this one: to restore to Jacques Austerlitz the individuality of his name and experience, to rescue the living privacy of the surname ‘Austerlitz’ from the dead, irrelevant publicity of the place-name ‘Austerlitz’. Jacques should not be a battle, or ...”

“... Stones particularly did release chicks from the fact of “I’m just a little chick.”’ This may be one of those places where Fox needed to do a touch more editorial work, just for coherence, not in any way to prevent the authentic voice of Keith Richards on the subject of feminism from being heard. You do get the feeling that Keith can take or leave ...”

“... megaphone: Let’s get gone. Having accomplished this pious job of work – as the older reader may no doubt recall – Jones then blew his own brains out in the swampy afternoon heat. Let’s get gone. Pre-Jonestown, the Reverend Cecil was pretty tight, I guess, with his fellow man of the cloth; he defended Jones in the press (as did Harvey Milk) when ...”

“... from Paris, about 150 km upstream, and the river had been swollen for a while. People in Paris may have been nervous, but by and large they put their trust in news from the national Hydrometric Service. Agents working for the service usually sent reports from their stations by cable, but on 20 January water breaking over the banks of the Loing had brought ...”

“... contemporaries, nature had begun to look like a solution (or an absolution). He realised that it may be our nature not to find nature reassuring, even in, or especially in, its sublimity. For Byron it was clearly not alluring – or rather, it was a temptation to be avoided – to be somehow other or more than oneself. Sexuality seemed more revealing to him ...”

“... disappoint. He admired Americans for their kindness, their respect for women (‘Husband and wife may be unhappy, but you seldom hear of a woman carrying the marks of a man’s brutality’), but above all for their generosity towards tramps and beggars. It’s not clear from his autobiography whether Davies had come across Whitman’s paean to the open road ...”

“... customs and superstitions: ‘When a woman gets married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives …’ The list is impressively various and detailed: I have no idea how much of it Erpenbeck invented. And its effect is strangely powerful, because it makes the business of love and marriage seem so ...”

“... There’s a pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book so wonderfully patronising it may in fact be mocking the problems non-Africans have with names they consider exotic. If you’re called Taiye Selasi there must be many countries in which you are constantly required to spell and explain your name, which is bound to feel like defending your ...”

“... all this, she decides, is an invitation to go on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Others may weigh up the value of the £250,000 fee against the bottomless humiliation of being on the programme. Jones never mentions the problem of the programme’s format or the way participants are degraded and mortified: she only sees a quick way out of ...”

“... course, and speed limits were quickly reintroduced, just as the Germans were abolishing them. In May 1939, the Nazi regime finally admitted defeat, and reimposed speed restrictions on all roads except motorways, which continue to be without them and are the most terrifying roads in Europe. Cars, Hitler proclaimed, had to lose their ‘class-based and, as a ...”

“... off with a set of ‘queries’ that might form suitable topics for polite conversation. ‘May not the harmony and discord of Colours arise from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves,’ he asked winningly, ‘as the harmony and discord of sounds arise from the proportions of the vibrations of the ...”

“... a figure of fun – gave Europe its 19th century. Alexander’s embrace of the old-time religion may not have injured his commitment to constitutions, but it did provide him with a convenient alibi when the alliance he built began to be used as a bludgeon. His fear of revolutionary secret societies like the Carbonari, long encouraged by the aristocratic ...”