“... 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 ...”

“... paris’. Beneath these functional titles we are given the place and date of writing: ‘Berlin, May 1821; revised in July 1846’, ‘London, April to September 1822’. The effect is to make the reader constantly aware of the author’s presence; frequently, Chateaubriand offers chatty preambles, as if to help himself settle down to his task, perhaps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his best works, ‘Children of the Working Class’ (1972). The poem attends to those ‘whom you may never see’, who are ‘locked in Taunton State Hospital and other peon work farms/drudge from morning until night, abandoned within destitute crevices/ odd clothes’, and ends:Yes life was hard for them, much more hard than for any bloated millionaire, who ...”

“... to the story of the Corinthian Maid and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The ...”

“... and baked onstage, as if the real-time-ness of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but ...”

“... with The Sportswriter, meaning that no event need be skipped. Alec, dancing with his ex-wife, may feel that ‘fifteen years are nothing,’ but fifteen years in these pages is long enough to contain a long prison sentence, subsequent rehabilitation and eventually the training required to answer phones as a Samaritan. It’s long enough for a mod to ...”

“... not in jail – these were not the things we meant by “life” when we started. I mean, they may have happened, but not on purpose.’ Aids was killing her friends, ‘the biggest events in people’s lives [were] receiving cakes at meetings for how many years they’ve been sober’, the political gains of the 1960s were slipping away, artists were ...”

“... the teaching of what they call ‘critical race theory’. Lysistrata and Women of the Assembly may seem to propose a radical critique of the disenfranchisement of women in Athenian democracy. But both plays – performed by and for men – reinforce the stereotypical view of Athenian men that women are primarily interested in sex and drinking, and ...”

“... and to be organised collectively rather than at the level of the individual. ‘Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse,’ she wrote. ‘It is not, however, an intellectual position.’ As soon as she finished it, Nochlin knew that she had written something significant, though years later – on one of many occasions when she revisited the essay – she ...”

“... territory. You are about to become someone else’s problem. But not here. Phillips told me it may take three or even four times as long to get airside as it did elsewhere. There were numerous document, baggage and security checks, a final reminder of the almost perfect fusion of bureaucracy and paranoia that Turkmenistan had achieved. I was following a ...”

“... in the museum they allow light to stream in.A curatorial delegation arrived in New York in May 1975 for the first round of acquisitions. They bought Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground; several Picassos, including Open Window on the Rue de Penthièvre in Paris; and de Kooning’s Light in August. In the months that followed, these were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... really be accused of having failed to adopt an equivalent role in Europe? In my view, what Germany may justifiably be criticised for is its reckless identification of a common currency with ‘the European project’. There, of course, the governments of France and the Mediterranean countries are to blame as well, as they still hope to use the hard euro as an ...”

“... alienating Muslims, especially young people and students,’ and ‘counter-terrorism measures may themselves feed and sustain terrorism.’ MI5 rejected the conveyor belt theory in 2008, in a report leaked to the Guardian. In 2010, the incoming coalition cabinet received a briefing (leaked to the Sunday Telegraph) that warned them not ‘to regard ...”