“... is margarita, leading many commentators to assume that the child’s name was Margery or Margaret). He can’t even bring himself to say that she was his daughter, just that she was closer ‘than aunt or niece’. He is obsessed with his loss and has come to visit her grave. ‘Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere [a grassy plot]/My privy perle withouten ...”

“... Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and weed-choked concrete landscapes that appear again and again in JGB’s imagined futures, the collapsing buildings and insanely ...”

“... There are​ people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore ...”

“... long predates the internet, as does the mentality and culture of fandom (he notes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fanatical supporter of the Princeton football team, to a point where he would call the coach to offer tactical advice, some of which may even have inspired a new tactic known as the ‘two-platoon system’ in the 1930s). But the internet ...”

“... about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and ...”

“... and belonged to a glittering group of gamblers, ravers, spendthrifts and eccentrics which included Margaret Thatcher, whose enterprise culture of the Eighties, with its poor view of poverty and failure, must have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely have ...”

“... this glove, I tell him. ‘Oh I used to have an apron,’ he says in a camp Cockney accent, ‘but Margaret won’t let me wear it’ – I laugh at this East End butcher’s Masonic joke. I go back to our place and begin opening the oysters. I hackle them open and lay them out – alive and violated – on a metal tray. I’m thinking they are a shade ...”

“... of Zélide (Benjamin Constant’s mistress, Mme de Charrière) by Wharton’s friend Geoffrey Scott – Mainwaring’s Mysteries is the product of long and deep digging in all kinds of likely and unlikely places. And in this dogged quest, she has been driven by motives quite as mixed and dark as anything in Eugène Sue’s sensational Mystères de ...”

“... a pension of $200 a month. The Petrov episode was possibly in Gorbachev’s mind when he first met Margaret Thatcher at Chequers on 16 December 1984. Thatcher’s papers minute what he told her: ‘Mr Gorbachev argued that if both sides continued to pile up weapons this could lead to accidents or unforeseen circumstances and with the present generation of ...”

“... answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps ...”

“... ripped into the other speakers, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. The atmosphere, as Sophie Scott-Brown describes in her excellent biography of Samuel from 2017, was already bad. The Ruskin student collective organising the conference wasn’t keen on the theoretical preoccupations of many academics in the History Workshop editorial collective; some ...”

“... scholars, traces these in detail. The erudite merchant Prosper Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was ...”

“... anything he had previously recorded, from what any rock star has ever recorded (except perhaps Scott Walker, a Bowie household god from way back): spare, hauntingly personal and as close to simple and emotionally direct as he would ever let himself get. In his age of grand illusion he returned to stately melodies and simple words. ‘Word on a Wing’ is ...”

“... think of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the debate (I don’t know enough about the rules of procedure in the Senate to have a sense of how justified, or not, that ...”

“... county sheriff warned that Black Lives Matter would soon be teaming up with Isis. Rick Scott – who successfully ran for governor of Florida a few years after his healthcare company paid a fine of almost a billion dollars for defrauding the federal government – helpfully explained: ‘This election is not actually about Donald Trump or Hillary ...”