“... 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 ...”

“... day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death’. She adds, defending herself, ‘You may say I shouldn’t have enlightened her – I should have let her alone. There’s a good deal in that, but I acted conscientiously; I thought she was meant for something better. It occurred to me that it would be a kindness to take her about and introduce her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than I have of the Norwegian context will no doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than 90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the country’s population was ...”

“... to paint, her paintings becoming ever more distilled and intense. She wrote in a letter: ‘I may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior life.’ In her work she showed no dependence on Rodin’s romantically charged, monumental style. Her paintings were usually very small, her focus narrow. She always knew what she ...”

“... reasons: he and Alex shared an ex-girlfriend, a porn actress named Vodka Satana, whose suicide may have been something more sinister. Dopalet forces women (employees, his wife) to do things for him and to him as a way of reasserting his virility and waning influence in the film industry. (This would perhaps feel trite if Despentes hadn’t written 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 ...”

“... Elisabeth goes next door to interview him about his memories because he’s so old. What readers may not recall is that Daniel tells her almost nothing about his past. Their relationship, almost a father-daughter bond, comes from talking about art, and playing a game describing what you can remember from pictures, not real life. (Elisabeth later becomes an ...”

“... cutting and pasting the halves of different proverbs together:Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words lead to Rome:‘Red sky at night, do as the Romans do –Rome wasn’t built in a storm …’When in Rome, gather no moss:All silver linings lead to RomeBut my favourite work of theme and variation is ‘Marriage of Two ...”

“... from China amount to nearly $5 billion. Given that the railway is yet to turn a profit, Kenya may be forced to cede the port to China. More likely, China will renegotiate the debt, extending the repayment schedule.Transport infrastructure has historically served to bind fractious peripheral territories to the centre. America’s Pacific Railroad, built in ...”

“... There’s always the danger that a prize – especially if it comes early in a career – may distort a writer’s delicate negotiation of voice and audience, like amplifying it through a public address system. You learn to write by adjusting sentences for an imagined listening ear, with responsibilities in many directions (to see clearly and ...”

“... their fathers or husbands, painting before an audience was a means of demonstrating autonomy. In May 1664, Cosimo, Grand Prince of Tuscany, joined the visitors who packed into Elisabetta Sirani’s studio in Bologna to watch her paint a breastfeeding scene. Having established the first secular art school for girls after inheriting her father’s ...”

“... within the same social groups’ and within towns and communities. Elites on both sides may have lamented the brutality of the peasants in their armies – Yannis Macriyannis rebuked his troops for their readiness to indulge in plunder and looting during the civil war in the Peloponnese – but the mobilisation of the rural poor created a new ...”

“... while the Tories ruled at Sam’s, Ozinda’s and the Cocoa Tree. By the end of the century, there may have been as many as a thousand coffee houses in London. The ones you didn’t go to were as important to your public identity as the ones you did. Places that were open to allcomers in principle might be selective, even exclusive, by custom. And Cowan ...”

“... on 12 July 1945 stated: ‘His Majesty the Emperor … desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated, but so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on.’ In response, Stimson supported an initiative to let the Japanese know that the emperor would be ...”