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“... barons into taking a wife, he shocks them by choosing Griselda, a poor but virtuous peasant. At first this unexpected union seems to confirm his wisdom. Walter has selected a bride who proves to be not only beautiful and humble, but outstanding in prudence and politically skilled. But there is a catch. Before tying the knot, he asks Griselda to swear ...”

“... out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence when the novel was published in 1963. Ruth Glass’s coinage was contemporary: ‘gentrification’ described a peripheral phenomenon that was, at that time, far from a demographic shift. It was a fashion in its infancy, so diffuse and various that it had failed to register with less eagle-eyed ...”

“... suburb of Zehlendorf – her family belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia; they were Germans first, Jews second. Their father, Robert, was a statistician, president of the Berlin Stock Exchange and owner of the largest private library in Germany. Like his son years later in London, Robert Kuczynski knew many prominent left-wingers, including Karl ...”

“... last season Covent Garden presented only one opera written since the outbreak of the First World War, and the number of new works since 1945 which have survived in the international repertory can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is it in our social psychology that feels obliged, or inclined, to maintain this chronically ...”

“... denunciations has (mostly) lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last ...”

“... trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a ...”

“... back towards a Germany where already 4.5 million people were out of work, the Nazi Party for the first time faced the fact that it might be elected to government. ‘Finance capitalism’, which they had been lambasting for 12 years, had got the country into just the mess they had predicted. How to get out of it? In two years two million jobs had been ...”

“... reminds the reader that many critics have found it an exhausted subject that should be put aside. Ruth Nevo, for example, in 1972 dismissed the question as ‘misconceived’. Jenkins isn’t so dismissive, but he does say one very odd thing, which I imagine others have pointed out: in the second footnote on page 137, he says that the word delay is ‘never ...”

“... biologists moved to counter his arguments with science as well as political opposition. But the first real fight came with the publication in 1975 of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which claimed that a new evolutionary synthesis would reduce the social to the biological, entrenching women’s position. Feminist biologists responded in a special issue of the ...”

“... he had worked on bomb shelters (having been appalled by the lethal technical naivety of the first brick shelters) and on the Mulberry Harbour for the D-Day landings. His favourite piece of design work – the elegant 1963 Kingsgate footbridge in Durham – was not a collaboration at all. Arup have put the engineering bones into so many significant ...”

“... In​ the first series of ‘Sh!t the Dowager Countess Says’, the YouTube compilation of Maggie Smith’s one-liners from Downton Abbey, she asks, drily: ‘What is a weekend?’ Cue eye-rolling around his lordship’s dining table and smirks from viewers. But the countess was perhaps not being disingenuous for once, given that at this point in the loose chronology of Downton it is supposed to be about 1920 and she is going on eighty ...”

“... superficial similarities between the stories of the two books, and each of them is told in the first person. Moravia’s Edoardo is a professor of French in Rome, Updike’s Roger a professor of theology at an East Coast university in a city that has marked resemblances to Boston (it has, for example, a Christian Science cathedral). But these are parallels ...”

“... Helen tells Jo the neighbours are calling her a whore and berates her for throwing herself at the first man she met, Jo has an unanswerable retort: ‘I’m like you … they all know where I get it from.’ Helen tells Jo she should have got rid of her – and Jo shoots back that she wishes Helen had. It’s a terrible moment: mother and daughter agreeing ...”

“... bath and a walk. 8 o’clock breakfast: dry bread and milk or water. 2nd, immediately afterwards a first and then a second clyster; another short walk; then a cold compress on my abdomen. 3rd, around 12 o’clock: wet rub-down; short walk; fresh compress. Then lunch in my room with Karl [Ritter], to prevent insubordination. Then an hour spent in ...”

“... cinema sea! Nothing is real here but the salaries,’ Walpole wrote. A decade earlier, during his first trip to the US in 1926, Huxley had formed an incongruous friendship with Loos (at 4’11” she matched Huxley’s height sitting down; he said he’d like to keep her as a pet). On that visit Huxley had found America distasteful. In his volume of essays ...”