“... behind her teeth. ‘How could I go onstage with braces and two large gaps in my mouth?’There may also have been a desire to adopt a different persona: confident, sexy, untroubled by mysterious ailments or an overbearing mother. She ‘didn’t like reality’; acting ‘was a way to escape myself and live in someone else’s world’. At fifteen, she ...”

“... biggest banks; but the all-time number one champion of pure finance was Jim Simons, who died in May. Simons founded and ran Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund whose Medallion fund, over a period of thirty years, averaged an annualised return of 66 per cent (before fees). That’s a hard number to understand: if you put in $10,000 and left it to compound ...”

“... conductor to be brilliant regardless of the quality of the performance he directs, the orchestra may look on him with scepticism and a weary tolerance. The relationship of conductor to players is acutely asymmetrical. Managerial and strategic power lies with the conductor. His musical will is absolute, but he is entirely dependent on the players to implement ...”

“... is undone by his own surges of brutality. The destruction brought on by cruelty in The Notebook may imply a need for something like love, but The Proof refutes that possibility: here love kills almost as surely. Like his friends, Lucas too is grieving. He hasn’t heard from his brother, Claus (an anagram), since his departure but sees him ...”

“... without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species – every insight that religion must deny and society ...”

“... from Russian blockade. European leaders sceptical of Ukraine’s ability to resist the invaders may think again. If, however, Russia clings on to its western bridgehead, it will retain the potential to swallow more of Ukraine, threatening Mykolaiv, Odesa and the rest of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast all the way to the Danube, and, eventually, the whole ...”

“... and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain, its thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ...”

“... he writes is unfairly matched against a public narrative skewed very much in Israel’s favour. It may have been with some of these problems of subjectivity in mind that Salim Nassib and Caroline Tisdall shaped their book the way they did. Beirut: Frontline Story has the effect of a montage sequence: interviews with a wide spectrum of political figures ...”

“... what is happening this moment, now; who manipulate the dread of a terrible future (and the future may always be terrible) to dull the sounds of freedom. Rosa Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to ...”

“... Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.Edward DowdenPassionate art, the drowner of dykes ...W.B. YeatsI suppose this is my biography, my life. Fragments of memory. Perhaps even a memorial. Except that I don’t believe in biographies and advise you to be especially sceptical about this one, written, one has to say, under the stress of illness and in extreme haste ...”

“... launched at the end of the 18th century by the American and French Revolutions’, which ‘may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’. This is ‘the most interesting country in the ...”

“... execution; each sentence must be determined individually and according to rules. These standards may, in practice, be impossibly high and, once again, race is part of the reason. As every prosecutor and defence attorney would know, black jurors are far more likely to spare the lives of the accused than their white counterparts. Perhaps, as McFeely ...”

“... a fact long before it was an idea.’ Elsewhere he says that ‘collective ownership of land may never really have existed.’ Much effort in the late 19th century was put into attempts to establish a past of collective ownership: this informed the Napier Commission’s approach to the issue of Highland land, but the Commission had to admit that there ...”

“... adapted to circumstance that the fouling of the mother’s breast by the faeces of her own baby may actually be advantageous to survival. Some mothers in the past, especially those in the upper classes, were so constricted by tight-lacing that their nipples were driven inwards and became useless for suckling. Others gave their milk for so long that their ...”