“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most fashionable cabaret venues. It was a ...”

“... in the streets and the Afghan police appear to pay no attention to them. It’s impossible to read intent in a face or a stance. You find yourself upbraided by the sight of a child walking up to a juice stall with his mother in a sky-blue burqa, the boy wearing a football top that says ‘Messi 10’ on the back. There’s only one organisation in ...”

“... reputation is now a surprise. His poems, though frequently studied in universities, are less often read outside them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his ...”

“... organised according to a highly divided system of labour with massively discrepant rewards. We read of the man who loved his pet fish, and talked to them, but learn nothing about his job. And when the victim was an investment banker, we hear mostly about how much he loved to sail. There is the firefighter who loved to cook, the claims adjuster who fed ...”

“... problem, but it soon got markedly worse. She was depressive, like Brown, with whom she drank, read poetry, kissed, drank more; apart, they wrote each other passionate letters. They became engaged, and were to set up in married life on Orkney, but Brown was unable to consummate the relationship. They parted. They wrote to each other – many, many ...”

“... I hated it! Or . . . Delicatessen. I couldn’t stand it . . . And I feel the same way about Peter Greenaway’s films . . . Yet I still get compared to these directors now and then.’ In the introduction to Trier on von Trier, Stig Björkman makes it clear where he places von Trier: ‘His development . . . is as daring as it is astonishing,’ he ...”

“... April. He studied medicine in Padua, where he specialised in mental and nervous diseases but read widely in existentialism and phenomenology: Sartre, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty. Few in those days entered psychiatry as a vocation but after 12 years in Padua, Basaglia was tired of university politics and the post at Gorizia offered a way out. As ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... and started a riot. The transparency was taken down and ‘Concord’ hastily repainted to read ‘Amity’.Unruly elements were always present in the West End, just beyond the pools of light. The shelter of the shopping arcade was useful for soliciting, the gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries ...”

“... Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But (1989), Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). He captures to vivid effect the distinctive lyrical anguish filmmakers like Jennings and Shepitko bring to their portrayal of the damage that war does to people and places; and, like any good historian, he has a ...”

“... by border militarisation itself) is being contained.’ The paradox of US-Mexico integration, as Peter Andreas has identified, is that ‘a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being constructed simultaneously.’ And he is eloquent on the ways that undocumented status is used to keep wages low and employees docile. The 1986 Immigration Reform Act ...”

“... the practice of connecting literature and healthcare by encouraging people to read books to improve their well-being’. She points out that almost a century earlier, Schauffler dedicated The Poetry Cure to ‘the noble army of CREATIVE LIBRARIANS, PRACTITIONERS ALL … OF THE POETRY CURE’. Drawing on recent work by Leah Price, Bucknell ...”

“... at face value. But might they be put to the test? In his recent memoir, Journeys of the Mind, Peter Brown writes that, when researching the medieval practice of ducking, in which a suspected witch was thrown into a body of water and pronounced innocent if she sank to the bottom, he threw himself fully clothed into various municipal pools. Since anyone ...”

“... flats was being torn down on the Old Kent Road. I studied old photographs of Avondale Square and read through online chats where people remembered their childhood friends. I went to the former location of men’s clothing shops, now pound shops; someone said the real Ronnie’s family might have run businesses there. Nobody asked me why I was curious about ...”

“... people who ask the right questions. The waiter replied, politely and in perfect English: ‘We can read your newspapers and watch your television; we hear what your politicians and your journalists say about us.’ That summed it up: all this time we Brits thought we were talking to ourselves, and we were, but everyone else was listening in. Belgians are not ...”