“... a climax to two decades in which his year had pivoted on Rome’s big March exhibition, held at the Pantheon, and its August one, at San Giovanni Decollato. Xavier Salomon, in a catalogue essay about these artist-organised events, describes Rosa reaching ‘a level of panic, over-working and exhaustion every summer, in the Roman heat’, as he ...”

“... following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history. I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead. In the musical-historical imagination – with its New York v. California, but especially its punk v. hippie oppositions – the Dead ought to be the ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... It is ‘boarded up, freighted … hoisted into a ship’, ‘pawed about’ by sailors, bumped, held up and hassled, ‘till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation’. This stretching of everyday meaning for comic effect is a feature of Dickens’s ...”

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

“... simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its ...”

“... still exercised by the American ambassador and the American military commander, Lieutenant-General David Barno. Afghans and foreigners alike call Karzai the mayor of Kabul and Khalilzad the proconsul. Those close to both report that Karzai not only defers to Khalilzad but seeks his advice on all important issues. It was Khalilzad – American-educated and ...”

“... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...”

“... and the political economists concerned the question of economic value. Smith, Ricardo and Marx all held that labour, in Smith’s words, constituted ‘the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’. Marx most fully developed the argument that the labour time embodied in commodities, including whatever means of production go into furnishing ...”

“... of reality was taking over. I felt confused, frantic, and there was no escape.’ One officer held her hands and pleaded: ‘You need to tell me who the murderer is … You know who killed Meredith.’ And at that moment, Knox says, she snapped and told them Lumumba had done it. They gave her a confession to sign. It said that she’d met up with Lumumba ...”

“... male – a music teacher in Red Cloud, an English professor at the University of Nebraska – she held fairly unabashedly to the idea that whatever intellectual or artistic gifts a woman might happen, freakishly, to possess inevitably came down to her from some paternal source. Even the great Duse, she believed, was first and foremost a ‘daughter of ...”

“... Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held out the promise of a dispassionate, unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced ...”

“... willing to let him represent them in negotiations with the British at the centre, while they held onto their provincial fiefs. This fragmented and disarticulated landscape was one of the reasons for the hubris of Congress after the 1937 elections. To its high command, the League looked like a spent force that might be ignored while the various local ...”

“... the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine ...”

“... to reason abstractedly, on the moral estimation in which particular classes of men should be held, or on the advantages attending political institutions, and to deduce his principles from arguments, drawn a priori from the nature of man, and who at the same time has surveyed men with attention, will probably feel a diversity of opinion, according to the ...”