“... not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.’ One of these dull elves was Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen captured the public’s imagination with its portrayal of Austen as the masterful miniaturist. Like her novels, Austen has always been read in different ways and Austen-Leigh took full advantage of the reading ...”

“... early films, from Red River to Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953), and then, after Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957), eight late films from Vincent Donehue’s Lonelyhearts (1958) to Raoul Lévy’s The Defector (1966), the caesura provided by the spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American ...”

“... Under King Feisal II, grandson of the first Feisal, and his Anglophile Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, Iraq became the only Arab country to join the Pact, in 1955. A year later, Britain felt confident enough of the country’s steadfast opposition to Communism and, more important, to Nasser’s pan-Arabism, to close its last airbase on Iraqi soil. As for the ...”

“... and constitution and imposing their own candidate as head of state, the British, under General Edward Spears, forced a complete reversal. In both cases Paris suspected Britain of trying to ensure that the Union Jack would fly over the entire Levant. De Gaulle raged at the British ambassador, threatened to declare war and accused Britain of unforgivable ...”

“... going, is vertiginous. Hearing its maker express his own astonishment at its prowess – Hassabis said he had no idea that it would turn out to be so good, so fast – was a little otherworldly, like a fleeting echo of the moment of divine creation. But the feeling soon passed. Really, is AlphaZero anything more than a toy? Hassabis’s critics, of whom there ...”

“... be kept firmly in their place. The great rebellion of 1760, described by the historian of Jamaica Edward Long as ‘the grand enterprise, whose object was no other than the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants’, provoked a change of policy on the island. The population of people of colour had grown substantially and some had become significant ...”

“... expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England ...”

“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength ...”

“... You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle ...”

“... setting, such as a big house, intensifies these conflicting pressures. (Alison Light has said that Christie’s novels can be read as ‘one huge advertisement of the murderousness of English social life and of the desperate need to convert to pleasure all those anxieties which an existence like that of the postwar middle classes could ...”

“... One time, someone gave me a slice of black bread. Another, a shy little boy approached and said his mama wanted to see me … We all walked up the dark stairs, a door opened, and a woman with a face wet with tears offered me a green open cardigan that I put on immediately. Everyone rejoiced at my acquisition and looked me over with pride, as if I were ...”

“... hundred members. ‘The vast majority are cleaners, bicycle couriers and security guards,’ he said. ‘There’s a whole goldmine of opportunity out there, in low-paid, outsourced work.’ So many people want to join the IWGB, he went on, that they don’t have the resources to cope: ‘We’ve put a temporary freeze on membership. We’re turning people ...”

“... is not actually mentioned). He is ‘bound to Justifie an informacion he hath given against the said parties for incontinency: 3 men with one woman in a bed’. And so the scene is set for the brief courtroom drama of 1 December 1613. This takes place in the newly erected Sessions House in Clerkenwell, known as Hicks Hall because it was built by the rich ...”

“... of the farm at Lochlie, which came to an end, with his father’s death, in 1784. W.P. Ker once said of it that it reverts to ‘the old allegorical, didactic form’, that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this ...”

“... young. ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might expect from a ...”