“... she most longs to be – an artist, a writer, someone who speaks to the world and is heard? It may seem like an old-fashioned problem (of course she can!), yet it’s a real one, and to investigate it Zambreno looks back at an old-fashioned world, to perhaps the origin of the possibility of wife-and (and-writer, and-genius): the early 20th century. She ...”

“... organisation: if the Surgeon and Weitz say they are now Orthodox, everyone follows suit. But there may also be a pragmatic aspect to their new faith. In the 2000s international biker gangs began to consider spreading their influence in Russia. Most prominent among them were the Bandidos, who offered to make the Night Wolves their local chapter. The Night ...”

“... Israeli orchestra that demonised Haneen Zoabi’s protest against the Israeli siege of Gaza in May 2010 when she boarded the cruise ship Mavi Marmara, which was part of the flotilla that aimed to break the siege. Israeli commandos raided the ship in international waters and in clashes with passengers, whom Israel called ‘terrorists’, nine Turkish ...”

“... eccentrics and others who don’t work sixty-hour weeks for corporations– though we may be a relic population. Boomtowns also drive out people who perform essential services for relatively modest salaries, the teachers, firefighters, mechanics and carpenters, along with people who might have time for civic engagement. I look in wonder at the ...”

“... jazz musicians in Los Angeles, to the flowering of his skill and corresponding fame. Rick Martin may be pliable in the rest of his life – ‘he always did what somebody else thought up’ – but in playing the horn he ‘shed the husk of indifference’, and he becomes purposeful, even headstrong. He suffers no spasms of self-doubt: he knew ‘he was good ...”

“... sien come il fruscìo che fan le foglie del gelso ne la man di chi le coglie silenzioso … (‘May my words in the evening be refreshing to you, like the rustling of mulberry leaves in the hand of one who silently gathers them.’) Parts of his 1903 sequence Le città del silenzio, a kind of poetic gazetteer of historic Italian towns, have worked their way ...”

“... told me about contemporary activism in Asturias, the legacy of the indignados’ uprising of May 2011 – the housing movement, for example, that has stopped evictions by Spain’s failed and bailed-out banks, and the squatted social centre where I met Amaya. There is a long tradition of militancy in Asturias, even down to the tactics and weapons used by ...”

“... by four large cases of heavily insured books’ – returned to Kirkcaldy in May 1767, where he would remain until 1773. Here, living quietly with his mother, and with his chief amusement ‘long, solitary walks’ by the sea, Smith drafted The Wealth of Nations. It might seem confining, if not smothering, for a middle-aged man of ...”

“... crowd, figuring that they couldn’t tell one Chinese from another.) Madame Chiang’s charisma may have been dazzling – especially to Americans unfamiliar with the way her husband ran his regime – but she was not an ‘empress’, despite the title of Hannah Pakula’s book. Her authority was minimal compared to the true last empress, the Dowager ...”

“... start again, only to abandon this second attempt. A third attempt in 2000 gives way to a fourth in May 2002, which I put aside after three months and do not pick up again until October 2004, when my daughter returns from a trip to Madagascar with a little dictionary of Créole. In it I find the nursery rhyme which appears in the opening chapter: Waï, waï, mo ...”

“... given the honour of making the first toast: Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Everyone froze. [Deputy Minister of Defence, Marshal Mitrofan] Nedelin grinned and, rising ...”

“... great pleasure is to be found in this web of connections: how the birth of one of his children may have helped to shape the birth scenes in Oliver Twist or David Copperfield, how his revulsion at Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents fuelled an article attacking the Pre-Raphaelites in general, or just why that Megalosaurus ‘would have been fresh ...”

“... not the best of losers). His refusal to quit Number Ten after the February 1974 election may not have been quite as deplorable as Gordon Brown’s recent carry-on, which would have made a limpet blush. Heath, after all, had secured more votes nationally than Wilson and had only four fewer MPs. Yet his behaviour imprinted the image of a lousy loser ...”

“... the fact that fewer than a quarter of historians in France work on the history of other countries may help explain Burguière’s restricted field of vision. Bloch and Febvre had many international connections and shared a broad, cosmopolitan vision. Bloch himself declared that historians should ‘base their plan, the treatment of the problems they ...”

“... is accused of violence and carelessness, of all sorts of vicious, undermining antics, and things may have been so, but the letters are organised – unfairly? judiciously? – to make Bellow seem the moral victor in all of this. The only reason we are reading one side of this sad exchange is that Bellow was the famous writer and these are his letters: they ...”