“... for today’s royal women even at the height of summer. Antiquated traditions of court dress may have provided a semblance of stability as George III suffered from his periodic bouts of ‘madness’ and revolutions raged in America and France. But when George IV eventually dispensed with his mother’s old hoops, the ladies at court must have breathed a ...”

“... have very wide participation, are primarily a goad to legislative action. But successful campaigns may also provoke legislative repression, even beyond the recent draconian restrictions on physical protest. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a deliberate echo of the peaceful campaign against apartheid South Africa, is explicitly targeted by the ...”

“... speech to the Knesset, or at least the part quoted here, wasn’t widely reported. I see why. It may have been (strange times we live in) a case of genuine media revulsion. Readers need the newsroom to skim off obscenities. But it’s hard to imagine the Murdoch boys having an attack of good taste. No doubt fear of the oil-slick charge of antisemitism was ...”

“... two pictures on the wall behind him in the portrait, strange emblems that seem superimposed and may have been painted by another hand. In an essay on the painting published in 2010, Tim Wilks points out that in most respects the portrait fits the model of the recently established Venetian chamber portrait, with a half-length sitter and a covered table ...”

“... No one knows for sure why the Chinchorro began to mummify their dead, but scholars believe it may have been a response to high mortality rates, caused by the extreme desert environment and the presence of natural arsenic in the Camarones River. Miscarriages were common, and children often died young. I spoke to Bernardo Arriaza, an expert on the ...”

“... They also make us vulnerable to loss: ‘In valuing, we give hostages to fortune, and fortune may be cruel. Only a person who valued nothing could achieve emotional invulnerability.’ But to Scheffler, the choice is clear: the radical detachment recommended as an escape from vulnerability is an escape from life itself. Attachments don’t only give our ...”

“... trap. A film director makes a film about a film director making a film about a film director who may just about manage to make a film, if migraines and panic attacks allow: it’s not Almodóvar’s – or anyone’s – most gripping plot, and he was once a notably fiendish plotter. In the short story that became the kernel of Bitter Christmas, written in ...”

“... profession of faith,’ he stated, ‘but I cannot discount at least the possibility that he may in later years suffer some diminution in his convictions.’ The boy was transfused; but when he turned 18 he exercised his right to refuse further transfusions, and died. In McEwan’s version, the boy, Adam Henry, is ‘a very strange and beautiful young ...”

“... gross negligence manslaughter, felt these parents also deserved sympathy and understanding. Marten may have loved the wrong man, and expressed maternal devotion in socially unacceptable ways; the couple may have failed their children at times and tried to escape a system they saw as pernicious and cruel. But did they deserve ...”

“... rescuing locked-out housewives by clambering up and letting them in. It’s not news that writers may write their meta-novels in a non-linear way. It’s not the continuity of a story that startles you in the move between ‘Joe Laughed’ and Kieron Smith, Boy, published a decade apart, but the continuity of a stylistic arc. The existence of this pre-written ...”

“... In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English. This is precisely what happens here. While Borde and Malovany-Chevallier fetishise Beauvoir’s semicolons, they fail to respect the structure of the sentences and clauses between the semicolons. Throughout ...”

“... wealth, easy success, unproblematic seductions and vast readership. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of 30 years shared a publisher with Zweig, Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag, wrote to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal’s ...”

“... idea from the main candidates in the French presidential election.When Sarkozy became president in May, he made Kouchner minister of foreign affairs. The new president had been elected on a programme of rupture, but no one was sure whether he would break decisively with Françafrique, the network of financial and military ties that binds France to the regimes ...”

“... the bewildering array of new opportunities for profit opened up by its disappearance. This in turn may be the key to why journalists have so often been targeted. For in the bulk of cases, what was at stake was not the truth of a conflict or murky state secrets, but seemingly more mundane business dealings: property developments, control of a company, factory ...”

“... sex, Lambert looked elsewhere; in all, he had four sexual relationships while undercover. In May 1987, just before the Debenhams action, he met Karen. It was standard SDS practice for officers to begin by infiltrating less radical groups in order to get to their real targets. Charlotte was Lambert’s way in. But Karen wasn’t an activist, and she gave ...”