“... fussiness and fascination, and after some of the more extended stretches chez les Guermantes it may well be with a sigh of relief that we find even the narrator himself giving up: ‘I should never get to the end of it if I began to describe all the different types of drawing-room.’ A translation must of course respect the assumptions of the original; but ...”

“... his most experimental and politically committed work to date, a direct response to the upheaval of May 1968. The next year Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin founded a Maoist film-making collective, the Dziga Vertov group, named after the Soviet agitprop film-maker of the Twenties, founder of the Kino-Eye movement. Starting with ideas about ‘Brechtian’ or ...”

“... James had grasped the basis of that paradox in white freedom and black servitude. Although there may seem to be nothing amusing about this racial division, the United States created the first mass culture in the world, blackface minstrelsy, to have fun with it. Minstrelsy – originally whites masquerading as black – was the obverse of racial passing ...”

“... has been heavily scored by a student and sold after the examination has been passed or failed, he may possibly make up in spiritual resource for the previous owner’s geographical advantage. While emphatically disclaiming the title of linguist, Montale was a devoted reader in the other European languages, and something of what he undoubtedly got out of them ...”

“... been the fate of every other government which came to power to tidy up the Communist mess. Gaidar may have been used to the world of power and influence, but none of the others, save briefly Shokhin, had climbed the long Soviet ladder to power: they had been catapulted into office at what was for a gerontocratic country a ludicrously young age. They soon ...”

“... to the level he inherited from the Conservatives. The results of a comprehensive spending review may allow Gordon Brown to give the NHS an extra £1.5-2 billion to mark the 50th-anniversary celebrations. If that happens, it will be a huge victory for Dobson. There are other difficulties facing him, however, which he might prefer to ignore. His most serious ...”

“... letters are often painfully docile. ‘Have I not been a good boy?’ he wrote from Shoreham. ‘I may safely boast that I have not entertain’d a single imaginative thought these six weeks, while I am drawing from Nature vision seems foolishness to me.’ Writing to Richmond, meanwhile, he sounded the mixed note of dependence and irritable resistance that ...”

“... different aspects of which might be in play at different times, with the result that a proletarian may find himself competing against other proletarians even though their class interests are aligned. The fact is that in the modern world our selves are far more fragmented and contradictory than that. Many workers have pensions invested in companies whose route ...”

“... had known nothing about the scandal, and hadn’t read a warning memo about it sent to him in May 2014 – which was lucky, because if he had, his subsequent actions would have amounted to fraud, and he would probably have gone to prison. A good day to flake on the paperwork, Herr Winterkorn! But maybe skip the trip to Disneyland, OK?The​ other story of ...”

“... across the kingdom. Any account must be pointillist in character. The danger, however, is that we may miss the significant shapes that emerge from these myriad individual points. An extra hazard is that many of the documents have been misdated in the past and need putting in the right chronological order (Clark’s text itself has accumulated a tally of small ...”

“... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...”

“... to the analysis makes the point that while the rigour and complexity of the statistical analysis may have ensured an authoritative answer to the question ‘Was Bristol an outlier?’, that very complexity made it harder to answer the really pressing question: ‘Shouldn’t the Bristol surgeons have known that they were outliers?’ After the Bristol ...”

“... present book, though clear and readable, tactful and scholarly, is a bit less streamlined. This may be because Lee has made much use of the live memories and personal archives of Fitzgerald’s children, and so is walking on eggshells in places. It has also been suggested that Fitzgerald herself may have done what she ...”

“... evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies. Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the ...”

“... that the buildings are showing signs of decay, that the seemingly vital city is crumbling and may fall apart. The speeding cars and bustling people are increasingly menacing. The story’s climax comes when Margaret finds herself unable to cross the street to get to where they are staying. Like many of Jackson’s characters, she has a moment of ...”