“... to show fear’ – but also glamorous, romantic and politically safe. The novels, still widely read yet less influential in popular culture than that one film, are different. In their relative unfamiliarity we may find it easier to distinguish the melodramatic and the exaggerated from glimpses of the actual era. They portray mid-century America as a place ...”

“... taste. She did not underestimate the stir due to a new Austen work. Well before we could read the play, we could hear tantalising snatches of it in a film which began by re-enacting the Sotheby’s auction – Jane Austen in Manhattan, directed by James Ivory and scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Jane Austen’s contribution to the film was ...”

“... the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments ...”

“... career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... was very nervous about its reception; hence the year-long delay in staging it. Anyone who had read the poem (Nijinsky apparently never did) or who knew the gist and had heard Debussy’s astonishing score might well have imagined a ballet of soft flowing languorous movements and fleeting hazy images. But Nijinsky seems rather to have found inspiration in ...”

“... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging ...”

“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

“... there is no debate and no vote. This leads to administrative absurdities of the kind revealed in Richard Crossman’s diary entry for 20 September 1966, when he was Lord President: ‘The Privy Council is the best example of pure mumbo-jumbo you can find. It is interesting to reflect that four ministers, busy men, all had to take a night and a day off to go ...”

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... that one day, some inconsequential trigger might provoke a breakdown, the way her colleague Richard Shepherd, who worked to identify bodies after the Bali bombings, described in his book Unnatural Causes (2018) being undone by the sound of ice cubes cracking in a glass.Recently Black disclosed her own rape, when she was nine years old, by a transient ...”

“... helmets, and on and on), the dismissive spelling ‘elf n safety’ used by journalists such as Richard Littlejohn to suggest that it’s an infantilising regime run by ignorant jobsworths obscures the fact that since 1975 there has been a reduction of four-fifths in workplace deaths and of well over two-thirds in reported workplace injuries. As SB ...”

“... and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties’. This was, he thought, ‘rather exuberant language’. The marine biologist Juli Berwald was more impressed. She describes her first encounter with a coral reef as ‘love at first ...”

“... say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically read every day, is it at any rate compiled from the skins of rams, goats or calves, or from papyrus or the rushes of oriental swamps, or from old strips of rags, or from some perhaps even more common material? In the later 13th century, Italian craftsmen in ...”

“... baby brother, Joshua. At Parsons’s trial, conducted by Governor Endecott, the charge sheet was read again. Confronted with his wife’s allegations, Parsons defended his apparent lack of sorrow at the loss of their children, explaining that he had gone to weep in the fields, so that he wouldn’t seem unmanly or further distress his wife. Asked why she ...”