“... than the most famous gamekeeper in English literature, but his jeremiad descends directly from Oliver Mellors’s explanation of why Constance Chatterley is the woman for him. The great thing about her, he says, is that she isn’t ‘all tough rubber-goods-and-platinum, like the modern girl’. She has a tenderness which has ‘gone out’ of the ...”

“... bullying editor Rudiger. Leventhal strives not to be cowed: Too many people looking for work were ready to allow anything. The habit of agreement was strong, terribly strong. Say anything you like to them, call them fools and they smiled, turn their beliefs inside out and they smiled, despise them and they might grow red, but they went on smiling because they ...”

“... the ‘cheerful ending’ that Howells would have preferred for The American, he was also ready to take their critical engagement as a form of appreciation. ‘After your approval ... nothing could give me greater delight than your censure,’ he wrote to his friend Lizzie Boott, who had apparently shared Howells’s disappointment with The ...”

“... it a ‘multiverse’ instead, but he still thinks its multiplicity possesses a kind of rough-and-ready cohesive life, so that, as he puts it, ‘each part hangs together with its very next neighbours in inextricable interfusion’ in what he calls a ‘strung-along type’ of connection. (He would have agreed with Henry that ‘really, universally, relations ...”

“... Kea – headed a team of white nurses. It was also the first place where a black officer – Oliver Law – commanded an integrated American brigade in battle. Hochschild returns again and again to American non-intervention – the policy Roosevelt himself afterwards called ‘a grave mistake’. Roosevelt had instinctive sympathy for the Republican ...”

“... to find larger readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing ...”

“... by his earnest and readily astonished transatlantic correspondent, Taylor showed himself always ready to oblige, explaining that he had gone on television to debate war origins with Hugh Trevor-Roper ‘solely because I was paid to do so’. What with these shock-horror revelations, can we wonder that Cole’s incendiary manuscript was tucked away in a ...”

“... A day when, had either of us been well enough, we would have gone on the march which, thanks to Oliver Letwin’s amendment, turned out marginally more hopeful than I was expecting. Looking for a book to read in bed, I take down as I think Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. It seems less chatty than I remember and it’s only when I come to the end of ...”

“... counted for little without favourable facts of political life. The essential fact was that Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army was pledged both to unqualified victory and to liberty of conscience, and that the parliamentarian peace party, which had allied itself with the Presbyterians – Milton’s ‘old priest writ large’ – was bent on the ...”

“... would have been the first to appreciate the risk involved. But he was, as time went on, no less ready to recognise the possible threat to his own position. Crown princes have deposed monarchs. Churchill was formidable, wary and popular. He would only go when he could no longer stay. Mr Carlton points out, however, that in 1939 it was by no means certain ...”

“... granted. Before long, having explored some of the smaller towns to the west of Kimberley, he is ready to move on, ‘not because of the other ghosts I encountered wherever I turned; it was my own ghostliness I had begun to find so burdensome.’ He is dismayed, too, by the absence of spoken English. ‘The people I knew had vanished; so had their ...”

“... in the same state as Sarah was in at the end of their affair, poised on the brink of faith, almost ready to change the way he sees the world in order to accommodate his distress and the unbearable weight of excess coincidence. The best bit of symbolism in the film is a kind of intertextual joke. Fiennes’s performance is inescapably reminiscent of his role in ...”

“... plan to his advantage, in the knowledge that there are quite a lot of people in the world who are ready to persuade themselves of almost anything rather than admit that a man with an air of over-the-top fraudulence has been taking them for a ride.Blay-Miezah was born in 1941, when Ghana was still the Gold Coast. John Kolorah Blay grew up in a tiny village ...”

“... bill of £193 million arriving in 2022. As with the financial crisis, nobody senior went to jail. Oliver Schmidt, an engineering executive, made the mistake of going on holiday to the US, where he was arrested, charged, tried, pled guilty and was sent to prison for seven years. (Schmidt’s sentence was supposed to run until Christmas this year, but he was ...”

“... blonde hairdos of the presenters might accurately be described as both fair and balanced. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.’ But the reverse is also true: quotations are ...”