“... basic medical services have been shut down as a result of the crisis. Most of Ebola’s victims may well be dying from other causes: women in childbirth, children from diarrhoea, people in road accidents or from trauma of other sorts. There’s little doubt that the current epidemic can be stopped, but no one knows when or how it will be reined in. As ...”

“... different as any two humans could possibly be, who fall into the orbit of a man whose sexual power may be likened to gravity. Williams wanted a great director for his play but weeks passed with no word from Kazan, who was called Gadget or Gadge by everybody in the theatre world. When Williams called Kazan at home, Molly, Kazan’s wife, picked up the ...”

“... inevitably develops a few singular, unassimilable and slightly silly convictions. (The graph may be parabolic, with the highest incidence of convictions – and the legal resonance is invited – found among those who have spent the most time thinking and those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of ...”

“... The oligarchs who bought up some of the most expensive property in the world, including in London, may once have been members of the Communist Party, but they were also opportunists with no commitment to anything other than power and lining their own pockets. The vacuum created by the collapse of the party system has been filled by different things in ...”

“... cabinet. ‘What have the Houthis achieved?’ he asked. ‘They came to fight corruption. They may have saved a few million riyals but the economy has lost billions. They came to fight al-Qaida and now we have Isis.’ The Houthis’ takeover was complete, but it was becoming clear that it had less to do with divine intervention than with the machinations ...”

“... about this paternalist relationship we cannot easily say. That period of absconding in the 1750s may suggest that he found it irksome at that stage of his life, but there is plenty of more general evidence that he reciprocated Johnson’s affection. He named his first son Samuel, undoubtedly after Johnson, and when that child died in infancy he named his ...”

“... were dreaming of becoming a global power. This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing ...”

“... though rendered ironic by the inadequacy of the protagonists. However ‘typical’ Emma may or may not be, the patterns of behaviour she is trapped in are recognisably similar to her creator’s. Flaubert had to make life difficult for himself. After the triumph of Madame Bovary, he was determined not to be seen ...”

“... see, and represent what they’d seen. (The originals of many of Haeckel’s published pictures may have been wall-charts used in classrooms and public demonstrations: that’s one reason they look like they do.) Specialist students were expected to look at embryos themselves – they were by Haeckel’s time beginning to make serious use of microscopy ...”

“... large amounts of money into the national economy. Such unconventional monetary policies may have prevented a depression, but they have been widely criticised for their distributional consequences: by inflating asset prices, quantitative easing has helped the well-off, but hurt people with smaller savings and pensions. These are trade-offs that ...”

“... do not know the city very well,’ he later admitted. He also admitted that as a result ‘there may have been a good many who had not heard the proclamation.’ But then Dyer also said that ‘it was no longer a question merely of dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were ...”

“... bosses dined early with their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his ...”

“... give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in her novels may have been cathartic for her, even therapeutic. But writing was also a discipline where she put herself at arm’s length. As Byrne points out, she preserved her diaries with one eye on publication and knew when she was self-dramatising. Byrne calls her ...”

“... when alone! … Nobody is to see this letter – be careful, Teddie. You are 19 – I am 34 – may it work out, after all?’ Dated 5 April 1923 and written on Frankfurter Zeitung notepaper, the letter was a declaration of love from Siegfried Kracauer, the Weimar Republic’s celebrated cultural critic, to Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, precocious teenager ...”

“... heresy’: the notion that supreme law should stand above parliaments, that judges in a democracy may reverse the will of an elected government if it violates a constitution. This storm has been brewing for a long time. Take a late 20th-century example: during one of those recurring leak panics, somebody in Whitehall revealed to a journalist that a cabinet ...”