“... 1940 ‘nobody dared hold an election.’ It was of course not a question of not ‘daring’. No one even considered a general election, which would at that time have been madness and virtually impossible. Nevertheless in its important facts the book is accurate. And except for its introductory few pages, which are overblown, Bringing the House Down is ...”

“... to watch the ‘burlesque’ and ‘tragedy’ of democratic politics unfold. Tocqueville had no particular affection for the Orléans family or the July Monarchy. But he had an instinctive deference for the symbols of tradition and order, and a fondness for heroic gestures that evoked bygone eras of aristocratic grandeur. On a tour of England as a young ...”

“... Buenos Aires, where two workers are scrubbing skulls with pink and yellow toothbrushes. In the hall, a commercial baker’s cart is stacked with bones drying on cookie sheets, like pastries in a witch’s bakery. Baby I love your way sings the radio as Emilia slides her finger into the eye socket of a skull. I wonder what someone would think if they ...”

“... for victory over time and the threat of being forgotten, for a glorious eternal name. But there is no restraint in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale.Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea – more grey ...”

“... acts of barter, to modern market economies in which money reaches everywhere and exchange knows no bounds. Free markets dissolve traditional social structures by encouraging everyone to enrich themselves through trade, but instead of unleashing mere anarchy – as most socialists seemed to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division ...”

“... those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy ...”

“... enlisted in the revolution of ‘total serialism’, repudiating diatonic music, Messiaen saw no reason to limit his options in the name of musical progress. He didn’t believe in progress; he believed in God. ‘Although he was certainly a towering figure in the history of 20th-century music, he was not of it,’ Taruskin wrote. ‘In a peculiar way the ...”

“... Hawksmoor the novel and Dickens the life. Peter was surely joshing her when he said that he was no initiate, had no knowledge of, or interest in, magical systems. He was the pivot, the man who had, single-handedly, made the arcane popular. A trip through the States visiting the Beat gerontocracy, the survivors, had ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... and his despising of the entire world that had produced the Douglases. Wilde left himself in no doubt about what he thought of Douglas’s family, or of the hospitality Douglas’s mother had offered, what he called ‘the cold cheap wine of Salisbury’. He resented being used as a pawn in the game between father and son: ‘I had something better to do ...”

“... people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going overseas’, the grande dame of New Zealand letters. She remembered her clothes as if they were costumes: a dreaded ‘grey serge tunic’ at school, a ...”

“... him are scarce. My grandmother, whose only brother he was, has been dead now for twenty years. No one else who knew him is still alive. By stringing together odd comments from family members I’ve learned that he worked as a greengrocer’s boy in Derby before joining up in 1915; that he served first in the Sherwood Foresters; that he managed to survive ...”

“... government from using more than a fraction of the proceeds of council house sales – usually no more than a quarter – to build new ones. Restrictions of various forms continued up until 2024.What gives Misgina’s situation extra bite is that for all the years she’s been waiting for a council house, technically homeless, she’s been living in a ...”

“... posthumous A Writer’s Diary, he laments: ‘The beauties the beauties the things I let go by.’ No one should approach Forster’s diaries, now published in full for the first time, with any expectation of the riches of Woolf’s. For Forster the diary was of far more spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well ...”