“... might (as they did) exploit her gesture? Similarly, Labour’s war on the grammar schools may have been politically naive (why end selectivity in the state sector while leaving the private sector untouched?), but it accorded with Williams’s deepest convictions. ‘I have never understood or accepted that some people, through the accident of ...”

“... had sent warning him against living with his mother. Thwaite gives this excerpt: Forgive what may be a terrible page to read, but don’t be robbed! don’t be robbed of your soul! I don’t mean by that exactly, simply, don’t live with your Mother; if you could do it without being robbed, that would not count, but can you, can you even live at all ...”

“... first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath. Greene had famously gambled his adolescent life on the odds that one of the five empty chambers of the revolver he held to his head would come up when he pulled the trigger (or so he later ...”

“... himself, contrary to revolutionary tradition, as the Bolsheviks’ undisputed leader. He may still, for all his later respect for and attachment to Lenin, have seen this as an aberration. In 1917, when Trotsky was busy refusing top jobs in the new government, his preference, apparently, would have been to act as the new government’s press ...”

“... and approved them. ‘Prediction is dangerous,’ the TLS’s critic conceded, ‘but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.’ A few days later, another anonymous review in the Times endorsed this verdict: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this ...”

“... plot. The magistrate meets a torture victim; he himself will be a victim of torture. ‘This may not be entirely honest,’ Coetzee worries, ‘but I must make the relation of the story to the Biko affair, the inspiration of the story by the Biko affair, clear.’ He imagines a trial scene reminiscent of Biko’s trial. But the word ‘honest’ signals ...”

“... Wharf feel uneasy about Crossrail. It doesn’t help that it’s been tainted by the macabre. In May 2009, construction workers at one of the borehole sites in Farringdon found human bones among the rubble. Shock gave way to panic as it dawned on the workers that they’d struck a plague grave and they rushed to get themselves checked out. In April last ...”

“... comes from being privy to Jim’s ravenous need to be there and to see it all, regardless of what may transpire. ‘My curiosity, in a sense, was stronger than my fear,’ he says; later on, ‘curiosity began to get the upper hand, and I determined I should have one look.’ When he finds himself in the apple barrel ‘in the extreme of fear and ...”

“... carry on the business of life to good advantage, without learning.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, sir, that may be true in cases where learning cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts, who were the first sailors.’ He then called to the boy, ‘What would you ...”

“... Miss Daisy and The War of the Roses (starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner). Roger and Me may not have done quite the same at the box office as these big hitters – $6.7 million dollars in the US, as against more than $100 million for Driving Miss Daisy – but given that it only cost $140,000 to make, this was a huge return. It proved that ...”

“... legislate a moral code rejected by the people. This, however, is a big city myth. Fighting liquor may have been the greatest reform in US history: it engaged more people and more passion over more time than any other American movement. Across the rural heartland, Americans welcomed Prohibition. The cynical reporters would have had a difficult time finding ...”

“... difficulties.) We don’t know which novel Cooper put aside in exasperation in the middle of May 1820, exclaiming ‘I could write you a better book than that myself!’, but by November that year the first of his 32 novels was in print, and he was halfway through his second. By the time he died in 1851, Smith’s taunt had been answered not just by ...”

“... most Lib Dems, a large part of the Parliamentary Labour Party, probably William Hague, Theresa May, Alan Duncan and a few other Tories; Cameron and Osborne might be honorary or temporary members. The party of the right would include everyone else (including many members of the government). This would offer a more accurate representation of opinion than ...”

“... anti-semites, and has tended to be shunned as a result. But avoiding certain questions because one may not like the answers is a kind of intellectual dishonesty, no matter how virtuous the motives (my comment, not Slezkine’s: his work, for all its potential for controversy, is free of polemics). It is, in fact, impossible to understand the victimisation of ...”

“... the man who is widely considered the greatest writer in history. The best insight into who he was may lie in the parrot perched before you, a tenth-generation descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a ...”