“... reformed. This generalisation from their painful encounter is borne out by events. Romney’s grand house, converted into a refuge for the poor, is set alight by an angry mob, who take it to be a prison, and he is ground down by overwork and retributively blinded like Milton’s Samson. These setbacks change his views (Aristotle would call this ...”

“... in Graceland’s sunny living room, with its stained-glass windows of peacocks and Elvis’s white grand piano in the background. During an hour-long ‘exclusive conversation’, Riley read aloud her ‘Letter to My Mama’, which she wrote for Lisa Marie’s funeral. She and Oprah put on white gloves to sift through Graceland’s archives and ...”

“... never be able to answer all the questions about the origin of the collections’, according to Sarah Van Beurden, the co-curator of ReThinking Collections and a historian of Central Africa. ‘Other pathways … should be possible. For example, what if a certain type of object no longer exists locally, would that not be just as good a reason for a ...”

“... by Jean Nouvel, the architect behind the Musée Quai Branly, and the opening ceremony was a grand spectacle, with fireworks and light effects that reflected in the museum’s grid of canals. Artefacts from the collection appeared to rise out of the inky water, while the museum’s ‘Arabic-Galactic wonder dome’, as the New York Times put ...”

“... Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The ...”

“... But the book is a bloody masterpiece. Schenkar doesn’t stint on showing the worst: the farcical Grand Guignol of Highsmith’s four-year affair with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, for example, who after one gruesome fight with Highsmith in Manhattan in 1954 tried to kill herself by downing several martinis and a whopping dose of Veronal. As Hill started to pass ...”

“... of his argument, he sets out to emulate it. He there asks an equivalent question about Emerson and Sarah Hale, the author of ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and of the novel Northwood, and the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. And he comes up with a similar answer: ‘If Emerson has been canonised and Hale has not, part of the reason has to do with the ...”

“... had devoted her life; but she had never, of course, advocated marriage across the class divide. Sarah, the Huxley family’s senior maid, threatened to expose the relationship.In one respect Murray’s account is less informative than David King Dunaway’s in Huxley in Hollywood (1989). Dunaway, unlike Murray, spoke to Rosalind Bruce Huxley, Leonard’s ...”

“... always much nastier about each other than any other people I know are about their colleagues,’ Sarah observes in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), Drabble’s first novel. ‘I hate anyone to be didactic except me.’ ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.’In comparison with lines like ...”

“... in Cameroon as well as the autocratic regime that emerged in its wake. He wanted to do away with grand narratives of social change – especially Marxism and dependency theory – that prophesied a revolution which failed to materialise or reduced African subjects to passive victims of the capitalist world system. ‘If the book deliberately avoids the ...”

“... hand-wringing in the 19th century over the perilous sanitary consequences, to Europe, of the grand imperial transport projects for which Europe was largely responsible. The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was ...”

“... it a drawing-room with blue-grey walls and reproduction furniture in a Louis XV style, including a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory figurines. French windows led to a terrace with steps down to a garden which had a long lawn and a large greenhouse.Upstairs there ...”

“... happy with the film), Weatherby declined an offer from two set photographers to take him to the Grand Canyon, and headed off instead to New Orleans. Desegregation was about to begin and a social explosion was expected in the city. This drama – ‘in reality instead of in a movie’, as he puts it – would, he thought, be a way of getting Hollywood and ...”