“... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...”

“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... shapes against the walls or over the edge of the tub as she moved around.Winnicott’s elegant white suit was crumpled; so was his handsome face. He reminded me of a very frail Spencer Tracy. His sentences were not always coherent but I experienced them as direct communications to an incredibly primitive part of myself; I want to say that we spoke to one ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... of most of the advanced economies whereby a large number of blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. Several processes were at work here: deindustrialisation, the growth of the service economy, the increase in the public sector, and so on. At the same time, the school-leaving age was progressively raised and the expansion of higher education ...”

“... most of which would have been to pay for continuous care. Ledwidge also tells the story of ‘Peter’, who served with him in the same reservist unit. A talented linguist, physically fit and a promising commander, he was seen as an ideal candidate for special forces, but was seriously injured in a bomb attack in 2006. The MoD told him, wrongly, that as a ...”

“... was added to the bad ‘news’. Women become clocks, always ticking away, like the crocodile in Peter Pan who had swallowed the alarm clock. Women must marry and have children immediately, skipping the attractions of further education or interesting careers. There were no men and yet it was every young woman’s painful duty to try to find and hang onto a ...”

“... from cheerfulness to death, without it seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... the newspaper coverage of the event included photographs of a pastorally beefy Elvis in a white rhinestone jumpsuit, gazing through dark glasses into the bright sun. Oh he was beautiful, with long uncut hair.I went to see his act on opening night: the narrative temptation was too great, and I’m only human. It was my first time in Europe, and I was ...”

“... Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, in which the journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée pick through a cache of documents, released to them by the CIA, that confirms the long extant rumour of the agency’s role in publishing the text in Russian.2 This rumour had already been investigated (it took him twenty years) by ...”

“... writings, the first detailed depictions of the Christian hell appear. In the Apocalypse of Peter, an apocryphal text from perhaps the early second century, the damned, as in Dante, receive bespoke punishments: blasphemers hang by their tongues, adulterers by their genitals and so on. The history of this iconography, Dante notwithstanding (and Casey is ...”

“... impressions. A train crossing a high bridge near the beginning, with nothing but a blue sky and white clouds in the background, seems headed for heaven; seconds later the narrator is talking about the flames of hell. This is a film of continual interruptions, breaks in perspective and mood. One moment we are asked to respond to the grandeur of nature, the ...”

“... and it is here that her life becomes Technicolor again, no more subtle Acoma pots or black and white piano keys. Instead there are parrots and toy planes and floors of raked dazzling sand and heroin for him, now on and now off, and more and more drinking for her. The memoir ends with the unfinished sentence: ‘Buddy lay curled up and shaking violently on ...”

“... with ‘suitcases, coats, a picnic basket, boxes of books and Lisa’s three little black and white Japanese spaniels’, one of which was about to give birth. But Lisa got bored and suggested they get off early. The next morning, they liked what they saw, the puppies arrived, they were offered a place to rent. That’s how Sanary-sur-Mer became ...”