“... not of a sovereign state but of one republic of the Soviet Union, the Constitutional Court may be persuaded to allow him to run again – should he decide he wants a third term. But if he does and he wins, Russia will find itself, once more, with an ailing head of state. The alternative is for Yeltsin to start grooming a successor, but that, too, is ...”

“... indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have been the determining factor. Again, Hogg recognised that Churchill had gone too far with his infamous 1945 campaign speech claiming that Labour in power would require a Gestapo, but still he insisted that this ludicrous idea contained ‘a germ of most ...”

“... in my head, my sons are to bring together all the fragments without any determinate title that I may leave, from the most extensive down to fragments of a single line, prose or verse, order them as best they can, and publish them under the title of Ocean.’ Against this old man of the sea, however, you have in fairness to set the alternative man who is well ...”

“... called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu. Warhol’s pretty shoes, we gather from other sources, may in fact be inky revelations of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights ...”

“... experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications’. A similar precision is demanded when exploring the ethnocentrism of the patriot slaveholder. Not only did Jefferson wish to maintain America as a white democracy by exporting free blacks to Africa, he aimed to preserve in ...”

“... through his mind had Phoebus cast The radiance of his own divinity. Nearer the gods no mortal may approach. Halley meant it – he was in love with Newton’s ‘divine Treatise’ – and history has repaid him accordingly. To the late Victorians Halley was a Good Second: ‘the second most illustrious of Anglo-Saxon philosophers’. If you want to ...”

“... Coppée’s play Le Passant – if anything, she looks the more masculine of the two. They may have had an affair, maybe Montesquiou’s first heterosexual encounter, or perhaps that was, as with des Esseintes, with a female ventriloquist.Pozzi appears to have been a champion rake, or perhaps serial monogamist, and although Barnes reasonably winces at ...”

“... language jars – the Edwardian home, for instance, as ‘a site of struggle’. But that may be her point. I am less certain than Schwartz about the politics of her angry, articulate domestics. So many of her sources, often taken from press cuttings and newspaper correspondence columns, are hard to judge. Many remain anonymous and, as she notes, the ...”

“... existential choice onto the unmotivated decision that opens The Shadow-Line. Conrad’s choice may be interpreted as a response to what might be called the dialectic of success. The shift from sail to steam power made ‘freshwater shipping’ possible, to the great contempt of traditional seamen. This is the kind of work into which, in Heart of ...”

“... left him all her possessions in her will. But he was in his late fifties when they met, and she may not have considered him a candidate for marriage.The new technology of the telephone brought people together too. Frau B., a telephone operator, first knew the man who would become her husband as someone who was friendly and polite to her between his frequent ...”

“... never held any proper political power. He was born in a shabby palazzo in Florence on 3 May 1469. Years later, in the midst of a political crisis, he reflected on his childhood, finding consolation in the memory of early hardship:As for turning my face towards Fortuna, I should like to get this pleasure from these troubles of mine, that I have borne ...”

“... Earth (2008) – in which a range of characters negotiate the kinds of tension that Lahiri herself may have experienced growing up in New England as the daughter of Bengali immigrants. Families are torn between different cultures and languages, children divide their loyalties between Eastern parents and Western partners. Her plots are driven by polarities of ...”

“... women.’Perhaps this is not the moment to ask whether that interpretation limits her. The figures may be mostly female but the forces they channel are supernatural or unconscious, and their human forms are often cross-dressed. Rego’s best works look at politics askance – at power and repression, at the darkness between and within individuals. Growing up ...”

“... and so on. ‘What can we learn from literature?’ the protagonist asks. ‘Sometimes things may feel like they’ve been going on forever, but really it’s only been about forty pages.’ This is true of the book as a whole. Soon afterwards, the narrator sets up a writing group with another American expat, but doesn’t bring any writing ...”

“... endure are far more injurious to their health than doping. Used carefully, ergogenic drugs may even protect them from harm. ‘Training at the Olympic level,’ he writes, ‘puts significant strain on the body. Steroids reduce fatigue and trauma, and can also help muscles recover more quickly. I am not aware of any studies concluding that these ...”