“... were ‘literally drowned in blood’, and perhaps the results of the Algerian elections in May bear him out. Despite the fact that it won only 15 per cent of the registered vote, the FLN now has over half the seats in the National Assembly. But as Kepel would be the first to acknowledge, the violence, though less frenzied than it was five years ...”

“... Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman Capote.’ The first letter suggests the mangled and gnarled background which Capote was so hurt by, and also so strangely proud of. The second makes clear ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that a novel has a strong textural resemblance to those shaming things we have all had, though we may not admit to having had one since the age of six, namely daydreams.’In her early fifties, she started noticing that her body was behaving differently, ‘alerting my mind to facts it did not know’. Once, hurrying to catch a cab, she fell and temporarily ...”

“... us were in the same frame. He noted my pained expressions.’ This once ‘nightmarish figure’ may have ‘taken on the role of some kindly, distant uncle’, but his letters unsettled her. After she had a miscarriage (unbeknownst to him), he ‘said something that made my skin prickle’: ‘Excuse me if I say so, but I know I can speak openly with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 oddly indifferent. Now, with a carefree smile on my face that spoke volumes about my devil-may-care personality, I was joking about it all with this smart, confident girl – and that felt good. Of course, under the circumstances – a Zealous Chargehand hovering once more by the stopped fan, a sneaked cigarette break that had gone on for far too long ...”

“... waste that is burned for energy has risen from just 9 per cent in 2001 to around half today. This may seem a positive development, especially since incinerators have improved markedly in terms of toxin emissions. However, EfW plants aren’t all that efficient in generating energy and they emit a huge amount of carbon dioxide – in Britain’s case, more CO2 ...”

“... page, is striking. Most of the missteps are concentrated in the first two hundred pages, which may not be much of a consolation to readers hoping to reach cruising speed sooner rather than later. Technical flaws interfere with the mechanisms that allow a book to realise its ambitions. The title of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is itself such a ...”

“... 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 ...”