“... 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 ...”

“... in the 1510s to the polyglot monarch who, as an English ambassador ruefully put it in 1543, ‘may as well write to his friends, as Caesar wrote to his friends, I came, I saw, I conquered’. Parker’s Charles is a monarch of implacable drive: someone who managed to marry the ‘vision thing’ with a brutal realpolitik. Early in his reign, he preyed on ...”

“... along in the mythical underbelly of America … there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding,’ she writes. ‘Idealism came back in style. People got along for a while’: this is the refrain she weaves throughout the story. ‘Inside the melting pot. Inside the melting ...”

“... On 22 May​ , Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left his house in the Islamic State-controlled western part of Mosul to try to escape across the Tigris to the government-held eastern side of the city. He and his mother, along with ten other people, carried rubber tyres down to the river: most of them couldn’t swim, and they planned to tie them together to make a raft ...”

“... don’t think of their abortion any more because it doesn’t trouble them; the women who died and may still be dying. I haven’t had an abortion but my mother did, after the 1967 act came into force in England. She has Alzheimer’s now and can’t speak much any longer, so I can’t ask her about it. It’s a silence I can’t break, and I’m not even sure ...”

“... but still has qualities that combine the trickster and the heroical fighter. Tenacity (which may at times justify lying or violence or theft) combined with a sense of fairness are the main qualities valued in Pullman’s world. This is the reason the most memorable creation in the trilogy is the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison. Lyra meets him in her journey ...”

“... and landscape’. ‘He never built an ugly thing or a boring one.’ But the aqueduct at Longdon may seem to challenge this dictum. It too consists of an iron trough, but a shallow one, and only sixty yards long between the abutments. It is supported on three pairs of squat iron trestles, I would guess not more than 15 feet high, bedded into squares of ...”

“... right of recall gives them a further advantage as a borrow becomes warmer: the short seller may get a phone call gently suggesting a higher borrow fee. To be a successful short seller you need therefore to understand what Chanos calls ‘the plumbing’ of lending. One of the partners in his firm, Kynikos Associates, has ‘been on [Wall] Street for ...”

“... imperatives became acute.’ And each claimed that while the development of the market economy may have appeared natural and inevitable, it was in fact contingent on political circumstances. Early on Rogan identifies a crucial parallel: Tawney, Polanyi and Thompson all experienced an epiphany when they moved out of their comfortable intellectual milieux ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cartooning is. There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.’ He might have added Matisse, Mondrian and Léger, among others. They are all there, read through the comics, in his paintings: the ambiguous signs of light and ...”

“... to Moscow and back and was the only plane with the proven ability to deliver an atomic bomb. This may well have been decisive in persuading Stalin to back down. It was the world’s first example of nuclear diplomacy – and it worked. More important than Bevin’s amour-propre was a constant worry about American unreliability. ‘The Americans,’ according ...”

“... their dogs at the Game Fair at Broadlands yesterday.’ It looks as though the counter-revolution may now be ...”

“... meeting, known as ‘speaker’ and ‘participation’. In one you must listen, in the other you may talk. The form of discourse in participation groups is distinctive. Dialogue (in AA-speak, ‘cross-talk’) is proscribed. You don’t address your fellow alcoholics, you ‘share’. It looks to the outsider like a seminar discussion but isn’t; it’s a ...”