“... he’s describing, and, to readers unfamiliar with Labour’s doctrinal struggles in the 1980s, it may not even be particularly clear what the shift was. Smith’s references are also left unexplained (Eric Hobsbawm’s 1978 essay ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ and Kinnock’s 1987 Labour Party Conference speech, during which he asked: ‘What do ...”

“... impose peace and justify your sway,Spare those you conquer, crush those who overbear.There may be anti-imperial anti-artistry here, and perhaps ‘to you will fall the exercise of power’ and ‘justify your sway’ are designed to make it sound as though the Roman Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness and could only be defended by ...”

“... blows his mind; he wants to write the way Rodin sculpts. But the rest he can take or leave. In May 1902, he visits the Louvre and is unimpressed by David and Velázquez. He mistakes Chardin’s eggs for onions. ‘Nothing here means anything to me.’ As he leaves the museum he sees a blackbird, poised against a wall of green, which eclipses all the ...”

“... the streets today are the daughters of those activists. The demonstrations unfolding across Iran may not have a leader, but they do have a provenance.A month and a half into the protests, the Islamic Republic’s most senior figures are in disarray. Setting the official tone on 3 October, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, mentioned Mahsa Amini’s death as ...”

“... he had in his early verse. In 1845, he had ventriloquised a little charmer’s reproof: ‘What may I do?’ at length I cried, Tired of the painful task. The fairy quietly replied, And said, ‘You must not ask.’ By 1887, when he added an envoi to a new edition of Looking Glass, a fairy sets aside ‘tricks and play’ to send her Christmas greetings to ...”

“... then flow out into us, in the audience. In Medea, the chorus tremble with fear at what Medea may be driven to do; they are also dismayed by their own powerlessness – the plight of all women. The conductors of our responses, they lead us to compassionate her, to use the Italianate word Mary Shelley gives the Creature when he begs Frankenstein to treat ...”

“... in the vanguard of those seeking to throw light on the regime’s archive of treacheries. It may sound implausible that Andreas, a spoiled, cynical intellectual with no previous history of violence, would so lightly offer to kill his girlfriend’s stepdad and actually follow through. But Franzen handles it with insight and dramatic nous; the notion of a ...”

“... removed during the dig will be brought back and reset. There is no mention of parking, so we may have seen the last of the tattered blue van disgorging migrants. In the meantime, the vegetable sellers have been relocated from the other side of the church. Every Saturday in the small hours they set up their stalls outside the house. By nine in the morning ...”

“... Anglo-German Fellowship. He had several conversations with George VI during the Munich crisis and may well have helped persuade him to back the deal that forced Czechoslovakia to let itself be dismembered by the Nazis. The king was obliged to accept his advisers’ warning not to welcome Neville Chamberlain when he arrived at the airport brandishing the ...”

“... he wrote that, in the US, ‘all the resources of science are applied in order that imbecility may flourish and vulgarity cover the whole earth.’ Early Huxley, the satirist who delighted in admonishing the world, displayed an aversion to most forms of 20th-century popular culture. Jazz was ‘brassy guffaw and caterwauling’; movies banal, empty ...”

“... and apparent lack of strong leadership. Tyndall’s increasing pessimism about national life may also have been connected to his state of health, which from the late 1870s seems to have been appalling. Was this decrepitude due to overwork, carelessness, insomnia – or even marriage? At some stage – as C.H. Creasey and A.S. Eve hinted in their 1945 ...”

“... but there are signs that it is running out of steam. According to an opinion poll conducted in May, a year after his election, 55 per cent consider the government’s actions to have damaging consequences; the same proportion think its reforms are too authoritarian. Only 16 per cent view Macron’s politics as beneficial to everyone, while 76 per cent ...”

“... Courrèges boots and mini-skirts’, as the University of Sussex bulletin put it decades later. It may well be that my mother saw the issue of the Tatler featuring the twins: she was a manicurist working in classy places in the West End which would have provided all the glossies for their clients. But she really wouldn’t have gone for the Jay twins’ style ...”

“... when he appeared on the doorstep of 75 Landor Road in November 1903, and then again the following May. It has even been suggested that her seemingly sudden decision to emigrate to America only ten days after Apollinaire’s second visit was partly taken in order to escape his attentions. The poem ‘Annie’ imagines her on the coast of Texas near Galveston ...”

“... in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the ...”