“... made common cause. The Imperial College entomologist Harold Lefroy founded Rentokil, and may have been the first ‘research entrepreneur’ of the kind Mrs Thatcher wished all scientists to become. Sadly, on 10 October 1925, Lefroy was overcome by fumes while experimenting on a gas of his own invention, and never enjoyed the fruits of his ...”

“... life, things became easier. The success of the musical allowed her to tell an interviewer: ‘You may refer to me as an authoress who sometimes strips.’ And anyway, she was now too old to take off her clothes. She became a chat-show host (which failed because she hogged the conversation) and a regular on Hollywood Squares: a mainstream success of ...”

“... In Tuscany, ceremonies of betrothal reminded those present of the life of Mary and Joseph, another May/December union. The domain of these Young Wives was entirely domestic: they were certainly never to venture out on their own. A form of purdah prevailed: respectable women stayed indoors, and covered their hair and faces in public. The Young Wife is ...”

“... most African Americans are also European Americans. She thinks that one of her great-grandfathers may have been from Italy, hence a family preference for Italianish names: her mother derived Condoleezza from con dolcezza. One of her biographers, Elisabeth Bumiller, says that Rice likes to joke with friends about whose white ancestors were the most ...”

“... and will drop from the ceiling onto their victims. We are not prepared to say how much of this may be due to popular superstition.’ The report was produced because ‘the infestation of new council houses has become a matter of concern to Local Authorities who are responsible for their maintenance and management.’ Whether bugs became common in these ...”

“... functions as a formal conclusion that makes any further discussion or elaboration superfluous. Mao may be 30 per cent bad, but he continues to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. In a clear case of fetishistic disavowal, everyone knows that Mao made errors and caused immense ...”

“... existing social structures and cultural expectations kept women firmly shut out.’ Men’s wages may have been higher or more regular, but they were needed to support dependent wives: it is unlikely that there was any great increase in families’ living standards. Griffin also discusses marriage, sexuality, education, religion and political involvement ...”

“... advantage gained substantial enough, to justify the price. Hull admits that such calculations may seem ‘macabre’, but they are intrinsic to the legal case. An argument could be made that the blockade met that standard; significantly, too, Britain worked to mitigate criticism from non-combatant states by promising to uphold neutral property rights, to ...”

“... spring the New York Review let us go our own way. The LRB became a paper in its own right in May 1980, when the first independent issue appeared. (John Lanchester will write about Karl and the LRB in the next issue.) For all its genius Karl’s Listener was still a conventional London weekly, though affiliated to the BBC, rather than a political entity ...”

“... Mississippi dreamed of nothing more and tried to join up. But planes went down in fights. In May one of the most admired pilots, Raoul Lufbery, jumped or fell from his burning plane. The Ace of Aces, they had called him, the most revered American aviator in France. ‘To the young pilots Lufbery flew with,’ Hynes writes, ‘he was an older and wiser ...”

“... Lieven takes pains to show just how conditional and limited the Straits question was. Dostoevsky may have seen Constantinople as the linchpin of a massive civilisational conflict between East and West, but Russian statesmen understood that gaining permanent access to the Mediterranean still meant having to reckon with Gibraltar and Suez, both controlled by ...”

“... were at a certain point almost interchangeable – a sort of Picasso-Braque situation. But that may just be wishful thinking, in the same way as the idea that almost all the changes in Venetian painting in the decade around 1510 were somehow due to Giorgione. It would be wiser to admit that, in our current state of ignorance, it is impossible to say how ...”

“... the traditional attitude of the common law to the executive’. Traditional it may have been, but by Holdsworth’s day the judges had fallen into a complaisant doze in relation to the state’s powers, repeatedly deferring to a civil service now led by a mandarin class drawn largely from the same schools, universities and clubs as the ...”

“... of physical powers, above all the power of desire. Yet from the inside the same development may bear a quite different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks. He goes on to discuss the classic example, Tolstoy, and his supposed decline from the panoramic vitality of War and Peace to the ‘aridity of the ...”

“... But perhaps there is something in the Balkan water, or the Balkan genes, because, even though it may have got there by itself, a Lleshanaku poem will be a welcome and familiar thing to a reader of Herbert or Szymborska. It seems almost like an experimental object, a child’s poem, or a poem in a state of nature; life synthesised from carbon, hydrogen and ...”