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“... of treatment. It means that the reader whose thirst for knowledge is not slaked by the entry first consulted can be led on a treasure hunt for further clues. Start with Adam Smith and you find a picture and a few key dates in his career. But see Free Trade. Here not only the meaning of the term but also the influence of the policy is suggested. See ...”

“... Anni Albers​ joined the Bauhaus in 1922, four years after the end of the First World War. ‘Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of cross-purposes. Inside, here, at the Bauhaus after some two years of its existence, was confusion, too, I thought, but certainly no hopelessness or aimlessness, rather exuberance with its own kind of confusion ...”

“... do you write like the Economist?’ a new member of staff asked as he began to compose his first leading article for the paper some years ago. ‘Pretend you are God,’ a senior colleague replied. Given that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into ...”

“... to Labour in the Twenties and ended up representing the Party in the House of Lords as the first Viscount Stansgate. The family lived at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like ...”

“... Felix in 1854. This has exacerbated his characteristically Mid-Victorian complaint of Doubt. At first, things had gone well. Although only the son of a Cornish clock-maker, he had got to Oxford, after which he remained level-headed enough to return home and set up as a surveyor. He has a great love of the land itself, as the basis of life, and an inherited ...”

“... like flying in general. ‘I went to Mexico once and was sick for 18 years. Isn’t that right, Ruth?’ ‘That’s right, Bruno,’ old Ruth would chime in from the corner stool. I have always regarded it as one of the singular pieces of good fortune in my life that Bruno didn’t throw me out when I ...”

“... hand and a saucer in the other, a signet ring just visible on the finger beneath the saucer’. Ruth, in Anita Brookner’s first novel, was in love with a professor with ‘a neutral, faintly resigned presence’: but Kitty’s case is even more hopeless. Maurice is not only English, but specifically upper-class ...”

“... in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latinx on the Court, in 2009 by Barack Obama, who also nominated Elena Kagan the following year. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were all nominated by Donald Trump during his single term in office.Before a nominee can take his or her ...”

“... of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times. Indeed, such farewells are best got over with in his first book; if successful, the account of how he grew up and out of his small-town, small-minded origins will ...”

“... Oldsmobile came off the road at speed, killing himself and Edith Metzger, a friend of his lover, Ruth Kligman. Kligman survived the crash. The paintings Krasner made in response to the horror – and this is almost always her strength – are deeply engaged with other people’s imagery. Fighting with De Kooning’s Woman, as she does throughout – fighting ...”

“... not vice versa. On 7 February 1948, after driving to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and seeing the first villages that had been emptied of Palestinians on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, a jubilant Ben-Gurion reported to a gathering of Zionist leaders: ‘When I come nowadays to Jerusalem I feel it is a Hebrew city. This was a feeling I only had in farms ...”

“... to Mary that they are daughter and father. He is her personal tutor and he insists that for her first year on the island she writes nothing – only reports to him orally what she has been seeing. It was hereabouts that doubts arose in me. For the sake of her writing Mary has left her beloved boyfriend Jonno and the two gay men, an uncle and an ...”

“... and intellectual trends in the Jewish world’ but is actually a mouthpiece for the right. The first issue asserted that Zionist ideology had given way to a ‘post-Zionism’ that ‘sanctifies disempowerment’, and attacked the Oslo Accords and negotiations over the ‘ancient Jewish cities of Hebron and Bethlehem’ – centres of the Arab West Bank ...”

“... photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog-banks.’ A brief chronology, inserted before the first chapter, might have been useful; it helps to have some names and dates to hand. Schrödinger received his doctorate in 1910, after completing his military service, but was called up again in the Great War, in which he served with distinction as an artillery ...”

“... if at all, in equally essentialist terms, as the Oriental mystic who taught Americans to do yoga. Ruth Harris, who confesses that she has never taken to yoga, argues that both representations miss the point. Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years ...”