“... similar – this is an area where the two writers’ bibliographies decisively diverge – and may not have read anything similar. It’s easier to accept the shedding of any pretension to equality in relationships if such equality was never proposed. Even so, it’s not quite fair to suggest that Jay feels entitled as a man to a woman’s devotion. It’s ...”

“... with the sentiment, but the question is how to define ‘we’. Employees of the New York Times may be ready to own up to shameful jokes they made as undergraduates, but that does not stop right-wing operatives combing through their social media trails in an attempt to get them fired. A general amnesty for having once been an asshole doesn’t seem to be on ...”

“... being himself. As he explained to a friend: ‘If it were not for great self-management, and what may be called a strict intellectual regimen, I should very soon be in a deplorable state of what is called nervous disease.’ Thomas Carlyle, whose own nerves had their deplorable moments, knew a fraught hidden drama when he saw one: ‘How has this man ...”

“... and her question was the same as her brother’s, and asked in the same low, grave tones: ‘Where may I hire a thief?’ The story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious gullies, but this time the girl added: ‘I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewels; my father has ...”

“... listen,’ he wrote to van Doesburg. ‘I sent [Rudolf] Steiner my brochure with a letter, which may not have reached him personally, in any case there was no reply! I have been busy for a long time writing an article against all that, and hope to do some serious fulminating one of these days.’It wasn’t that he needed much: Mondrian lived alone, survived ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... faced discrimination and were forced to pay huge amounts. Everyone frets about the future; the war may have stopped for now, but there is nowhere left to return to.The tragedy of this war is that it has all happened before. Punitive measures inflicted on the local population in the name of achieving peace and security has been Israel’s approach in South ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a lot of that himself – than for the way old formal utterances have been strangely preserved and may be used in all innocence. By his original sure instinct, fine ear, and the formidable scholarship with which he later reinforced them, Humphries identified the pristine quality of everyday Australian English, a language which the self-consciousness of a ...”

“... beliefs, and the heterogeneity of their endeavours needs to be respected, but some common features may usefully be noted. Sun-worship was preferred. There were ancient mysteries to be understood. Ancestral spirits could be contacted. The racial genius, the spirit of the Volk, was ready to be tapped within. If the Christ lived on in one’s breast, it was ...”

“... symbols where none intended’? Does this mean that there are no symbols or that there are (or may be) symbols only where unintended? Given the active complicity of biography (as of psychoanalysis) in the tendency to regard sexual disclosure as the sine qua non of candour (perhaps what Knowlson obscurely hints at when in the Preface he says that his book ...”

“... that the struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that Zawahiri may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for insurgents to operate; but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favour of closer co-operation with bin Laden, only when he had no choice. It was ...”

“... Grass admits, finally, that he, too, has suffered crushing grief. In breaking this silence, it may be that he allowed that other secret – ‘What hurts. Even now,’ like the fragment of a shell still encapsulated in his shoulder – to emerge at last into the ...”

“... Sport Select Committee said in 2021, but there’s a danger that ‘some of the music they love may not be being made in ten years’ time.’Daniel Ek​ originally conceived of Spotify as ‘the future of the record store’. People already knew what they wanted to hear; Spotify’s job was to help them find it. But in the early 2010s, the authors of ...”

“... despite the scale of the crisis facing the British energy industry. The Burnham government may mark a turning point. It has promised to set out plans for ‘stronger public control’ of essential services, though the relationship between control and ownership has yet to be defined.In January 2009, a border dispute between Ukraine and Russia led to a ...”