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“... agents who marketed them. (The identity of its members remains unknown.)All of this activism drew strength from a larger cultural revival. Welsh publishing houses and record labels sprang up, along with Welsh bands, some achieving major national and international success. There was a renewed sense of cultural confidence, even when – or especially when ...”

“... fisherman who had no one to go out in his boat with him.’ Another, called ‘The woman who never drew breath except to complain’, begins: ‘In a country near Finland dwelt a woman who never drew breath except to complain.’ Quaintness on that scale can inflict serious injury. Some, however, are genuinely magical. In ...”

“... Kohler, American Ambassador from 1962 to 1966. Her edition has an introduction by Walter Bedell Smith, American Ambassador from 1946 to 1949 (and later head of the CIA). Like Kennan, who published The Marquis de Custine and His ‘Russia in 1839’ in 1972, Bedell Smith seized on the obvious parallels between Custine’s ...”

“... Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate had been equally unforgiving. Contemporary writers made predictions about the ...”

“... of some aromatic oil? Something small and hard, that was inside my chest, that was my heart, drew smaller then. I had no idea what he would want. The limitless possibilities that London affords ... if he should bypass me and find his way into the city ... but even then, among the limitless possibilities, I could not think of a single thing that he might ...”

“... cases that would otherwise fall outside the scope of the new regime. The lord chancellor drew up guidance on when legal aid should be granted. Recently, the guidance was found to be so restrictive – that is, the category of exceptions carved out by Grayling was so small – that it was itself unlawful. (Grayling is appealing this finding.) The ...”

“... in a vast institution, upon which as a creative writer with a somewhat limited imagination he drew for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Exhausting and exasperating this may have been, but it wasn’t, as West concludes, ‘soul-destroying work’. We can set aside the excessive claims West makes for individual pieces, as well as the illfounded suggestion that Orwell ...”

“... her intimations of bliss and connectedness, was the psychologically ruined war veteran Septimus Smith. In that novel the two didn’t meet, though Michael Cunningham, refracting the material in The Hours, had his modern-day Clarissa figure care for Richard, his version of Septimus, worn down by the struggle with HIV. The ending, suicide by jumping, was the ...”

“... not muffed his lines is almost as tantalising as the question of what might have happened if John Smith had lived. Davis’s campaign had been showing signs of weakness, but the conference speeches decisively shifted the narrative, turning him into the politician who had over-reached and Cameron into the natural-born leader. A Davis-led Conservative Party ...”

“... and try to imagine what they looked like. She made things in plasticine – heads, flowers – and drew and painted from a young age. When she was 16 she enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied illustration and textile design and took life drawing classes with Bernard Meninsky, who was known for his heavy black charcoal lines ...”

“... Beardsley merely claimed that his drawings were ‘anatomically correct’, reiterating that he drew only what he saw, even if ‘I see everything in a grotesque way.’ Perhaps his physical frailty made him feel like an outsider, an amused or satirical observer of sex. Barlow’s essay is titled ‘Beardsley’s “Obscene Drawings”’, inverted commas ...”

“... cadger and incorrigible scrounger’ who ‘ate, drank, gambled and spent to excess’. F.E. Smith was ‘a drunk, a gambler and a spendthrift ... rude ... and ruthless’. The second Baron Sackville was ‘lonely, unmarried, taciturn, disappointed and embittered’; the fifth Baron was ‘self-centred, ineffectual, delicate, neurotic, lonely and ...”

“... In the same year that the Kitchen Sink artists were honoured in Venice, one of them – Jack Smith – won first prize at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool, with his Creation and Crucifixion. Thanks to these successes, 1956 could be said to have marked the apotheosis of realism; it was also the year that the death-blow was delivered to the movement ...”

“... about Shippey’s book is the sympathy he brings to the Medieval literature upon which Tolkien drew, mounting to a brisk enthusiasm when, for example, Shippey explains how Tolkien reworked features of Old English poetry to spell out to modern readers things that an Anglo-Saxon would have known instinctively. But what is depressing about The Road to ...”

“... noted how fertile a metaphor computers provided for the autistic. The concept of circuitry, which drew on cybernetics and brain science, suggested an almost infinite malleability, and therefore an almost infinite inclusiveness. Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist, came up with the term ‘neurodiversity’, which was soon adopted as the watchword of the ...”