“... health, or lack of it. This recklessness has attracted the attention of previous biographers. D.J. Taylor sees in it a ‘detachment from physical sensation’ that can sometimes appear ‘faintly inhuman’. Sutherland’s suspicions are darker still. Virtually everything Orwell did in life, he notes, ‘was bad for his lungs and his lifespan’. So why did ...”

“... In​ a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire ...”

“... almost any of the narrative accounts published during the 1950s and 1960s and familiar signposts mark the path to national fulfilment. Convict origins, free settlement, self-government, gold, wool, federation, war, depression, war, immigration, industrialisation, prosperity. Each stage of the journey leads inexorably towards a still-unattained destination, a ...”

“... that we can hear differences which our received methods of scansional notation are too crude to mark. Ben Jonson saw his 1616 Folio through the press, bestowing unprecedented care even on accidentals. In 19th-century modernised texts his poem ‘To Heaven’ begins ‘Good and great God,’ or even ‘Good and great God!’ Within the poem the goodness of ...”

“... in the courtroom that day, though I did spot one of his most vocal allies in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sitting near the back. Chutkan went through a list of his recent remarks and asked the attorneys whether or not each statement would count as a violation of the order. She began with an example from August 2023, when Trump called the District of ...”

“... has remained uncontested by the entire musical profession and most critics (though Desmond Shawe-Taylor finds it ‘hard to decide’), the licence-payer is entitled to insist on learning the BBC’s own precise, concrete, practical and ethical reaction, which, despite some defensive voices from elevated quarters, has not been as much as attempted: let ...”

“... even some sections of the rural population. From 1846 until the 1885 election (the ‘high water mark of electoral Cobdenism’), Free Trade – together with its concomitants, the gold standard, retrenchment and a balanced fiscal system – was virtually a ‘secular religion’, accepted at all levels of society and almost without question. This emphasis ...”

“... Centenary Pessoa agree – Borges, Steiner, Josipovici, Hollander, Cyril Connolly, Roman Jakobson, Mark Strand – it is a compounding of Pessoa’s mystery that he has been anonymous for so long in Anglo-American culture. A canon that includes Pessoa seems infinitely less claustrophobic and bossy. There is, Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquietude, ‘no ...”

“... everywhere. His criticism of critics, restored in full with all its vinegary violence, is a mark of the artistic confidence behind the apparent modesty. He wants to dismiss his novels as pot-boilers, yet he needs to justify them in the face of the Philistinism and conservatism of his critics. One sees why Florence cut these expressions of snobbery and ...”

“... is indicative of upper-class origins. Bourdieu displays here imaginative insights which are the mark of the great novelist or the great phenomenological sociologist. At his – unfortunately, intermittent – best, Bourdieu can be classed with Georg Simmel as a master of the illuminating fait divers. La Distinction is about symbolic competition, in arenas ...”

“... better to do in England, and were happy to be swept along in the charismatic wake of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom they had just shared an enchanted year of poetry and talk in the Quantocks in Somerset, and who was now eager to learn about German science. The principal production of their year together was the collaborative volume, Lyrical ...”

“... Greenes’, as they were known (to distinguish them from the ‘Hall Greenes’), made enough of a mark on history to merit extended discussion in this book. Raymond, the eldest brother, became a leading doctor and mountaineer, taking part in the 1933 Everest expedition. Graham became a writer. Hugh Carleton became a journalist and eventually director-general ...”

“... that the motive was sadism. Nor does he think, like Hitchcock’s first biographer, John Russell Taylor, that Hitchcock, far from enjoying the distress he was able to inflict on them, identified strongly with his victims. The women in the movies are, Wood proposes, ‘whatever we most fear to lose’. This ‘we’ may be just a bit too comfortable. There ...”

“... to take account of my earlier reactions. I don’t even have to suffer the universal (I thought) mark of the canceree, her badge of baldness, because for some reason this kind or quantity or something of chemo had no interest in killing off my hair follicles. So I am grateful that chemo for me was not as devastating and disfiguring as it might have ...”

“... But it’s done with enough brio not to degenerate into an academic exercise, and the question-mark over the narrator’s real identity is skilfully managed. So, too, is the oddly touching relationship that develops between captive and captor, whose curiosity about one another is obliquely compared to Proust’s narrator’s obsession with ...”