“... with a few strokes or smudges. The body-type varies very little – the women are neither old nor young, fat nor thin. They seem fit, but not muscular. Their bodies, pale when you are made aware of skin colour, look as though they are uncovered only to be washed or reclothed. There is no Renoir glow about them. Few pictures of naked bodies are entirely ...”

“... been a stranger: ‘They say she was always very strong, digging in the garden, working hard. As a young mother she was always exhausted ... the nuns ... file out, leaving me alone with her for a moment. I kiss her suddenly waxen brow. Outside, I cry out wildly against the wall, wondering at such pain.’ Perhaps the saddest aspect of this first-person ...”

“... the spies, the bumped up officials of the Malawi Congress Party, the organised thuggery of the Young Pioneers, the dress regulations, the linguistic and cultural censorship, the silence, the fear of arrest and worse – all these have disappeared, along with Banda. Malawi was left poor by the British, and the majority of its largely rural population grew ...”

“... of recusant history, the ‘convert-novelist’ Evelyn Waugh had offered some barbed advice to the young Oxford historian, whom Waugh presumed to have disgraced: the only ‘honourable course’ open to him was to ‘change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge’. Decades later Auberon Waugh would exploit the Hitler Diaries affair to continue his ...”

“... across the more effectively for being underplayed. If, for example, there’s more going on in the young James’s obsession with aeronautical engineering than a boyish interest in jet fighters, the memoir doesn’t say. James describes his early experience of bereavement as giving him a certain self-protective coldness, an unwillingness to get too close to ...”

“... and multilingual population, Mołodeczno (its Polish name). More ironies here, as, when the young Bauman entered the local gymnasium, he became such an exemplar of Polishness – ‘no one around spoke Polish as pure and refined as mine’ – that the deputy headmaster, a Belarusian nationalist, took against him. But no matter: Bauman quickly taught ...”

“... flank, with a derringer bulging in his pocket, is a detective called Pinkerton. The hulking young bodyguard with two conspicuous guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new ...”

“... informative note, a detail of local colour which makes the opening action almost unintelligible. Young Elliott first makes friends with the Extra-Terrestrial, and revives him from incipient exhaustion, by laying a trail of ‘M&Ms’ from the forest to the backyard. ‘The great M&Ms have given me my vitality back,’ comments E.T., in interior ...”

“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... person at the Sorbonne directs him to the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. There he finds a young lecturer, Simon Herzog, teaching an introductory semiology course with examples from the James Bond films – material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his ...”

“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

“... tendencies. The academic careers to be built on theory had largely been built; the hardest-core young Derridean among our teachers later drifted off into management consultancy and wasn’t alone in doing so. And the French-style rhetorical flourishes that some of us were quite taken with didn’t always survive first contact with the actually existing ...”

“... in an earlier watercolour, they hold the instruments of Poetry, Painting and Music. No doubt the young women are taking their father’s narrative to heart, and in due course will rephrase it in terms appropriate to their arts: the lute and lyre are in the margins of the plate, ready to be strummed. But the first form of the story is visual: Job sits in a ...”

“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface ...”

“... punishment to one of reform. The report also recommended the development of the borstal system for young offenders and the improvement of prison educational facilities. The argument for reform, however, conflicted with ideas of female depravity. Were women truly accountable for their actions? Were they redeemable? Did they have ‘higher ...”