“... population was deported.Then there is New Caledonia, more than ten thousand miles from Paris. In May, there was unrest over a planned electoral reform that would give the vote to its French settler population, thus reducing the influence of the Indigenous Kanak people. The French responded by imposing a state of emergency; then, in June, seven ...”

“... this section of her biography ‘Breakdown’, holds back from a definitive explanation for what may have been some combination of post-natal depression, marital disharmony and a persistent sense of displacement in England. As Cosway wrote to Jefferson, the ‘caprices’ of the English – always referred to as ‘them’ – ‘disgusted’ her. She came ...”

“... through Sarah, we hadn’t spoken since the day he agreed to start writing. I rang Caroline on 9 May and repeated that the book could be completed but Julian had to want it to happen. Then Jamie rang. He said Julian hadn’t done much at all and was on ‘radio silence’. Jamie, as often on this project, went from being conciliatory to being outraged, and ...”

“... of near-total domination of his industry. From this perch he made his first big mistake, one which may yet prove, in business terms, fatal. The mistake was one which almost everybody in the business made: they missed the significance of the Internet. The story is told in Michael Wolff’s entertaining exposé of ‘the Gold Rush years on the Internet’, Burn ...”

“... there was something contrived in his remarks, as though he did not quite believe them himself. It may just have been that he wanted to take me up on the banal statements with which I had been boring him; maybe he wasn’t feeling well or was generally out of sorts. In any case, everything he’d said completely contradicted the idea I’d had of him as a ...”

“... but she knew its power and the seduction of such a thing. She felt undermined by what Virginia may be said to have represented, just as Virginia felt reduced by Beatrice’s world of facts. Each was a corrective to the other. At one point Virginia actually challenged the Webbs as to what her place would be in a Fabian world: ‘some small office, no ...”

“... for the body of the book; when he fails to make his thesis clear or his argument cogent, the fault may often lie, not in his thinking, but in the compression of his exposition. The current economics of publishing indeed create a crisis for scholarship. Perhaps, obsessed with present book prices, Bell has striven to pare his writing to the briefest ...”

“... company, assured Saint-Beuve that if he had his time again he wouldn’t pick up a pen. This may have been rhetoric – if he had never picked up a pen he would not have met Madame Récamier – but it was understandable. It had not been all that long since Molière had died in harness. Great artists are always simple but rarely stupid. They usually ...”

“... him, he is from our village, he is good man.” I not knows the man, dadababu.’ ‘Be that as it may, you should have been more careful,’ said Mr Banerjee. ‘I can keep you no longer.’ Bishu was silent. Then, looking at the floor, he said again: ‘Dadababu, I works for seven years in this house, this is my first mistake. Please forgive me ... I never ...”

“... anniversaries, please, unless they are our own brothers and sisters celebrating. Schulman may characterise the membership of ACT UP as suffragettes rather than suffragists, but this seems a lot like an assimilationist agenda. Still, if anyone is entitled to a little questionable speculation, after amassing so much compelling factual and human ...”

“... Engel was born Ruth, the second of twin girls, to an unknown woman in Toronto, on 24 May 1933. ‘Our mother was eighteen, just out of Central Commerce,’ Engel writes. ‘Her mother a widow, was a cost acct for Eaton’s. Times were bad. They lived on Walmer Rd. They gave us to the Children’s Aid.’ She and Eleanor were in foster care ...”

“... he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off he was in such a state.’ When Freud was in hospital ...”

“... Gwoza, Boko Haram’s former capital – a five-hour drive south-east from Maiduguri: Boko Haram may have been in retreat, but there had been no ‘final crushing’ and the roads were still unsafe. I couldn’t do the three-hour drive south to Chibok either: some lecturers from a local university had recently been abducted. But I did make a 14-hour ...”

“... an imperial ‘plan of regional development’ using new Iranian technology. The Achaemenid Empire may be the first to reveal its true impact only in pollen analysis. As for Aelian’s story about Xerxes’ love-affair with the plane tree, Briant produces a parallel: a seal of Xerxes which depicts a kingly figure about to offer a crown to a stylised tree of ...”

“... heard most often, during the last century, from the left. But hearing it in Rand’s accent may cause us to apprehend in it a different note: the nag nag nagging of a life lived and squandered in fantasy, never to be satisfied by any happiness on this ...”