“... transformative writers, to remain the Scotland Yeats had declared the ‘fruit of Robert Burns and Scott’ – ‘not a nation’ at all, but merely ‘a province with a sense of the picturesque’? I thought about that challenge when I attended a performance in Lochcarron by the Gaelic band Daimh. Their piper and singer, Calum Alex MacMillan, had a charming ...”

“... with payment records and phone data detailing their contact with journalists, pleaded guilty. PC Paul Flattley, who was stationed in Kensington and Chelsea, received a total of £7500 for 39 tips: he told the paper about the theft of a handbag from Zara Phillips, and about Hans Rausing’s failure to stop after a traffic accident. Flattley’s handler, the ...”

“... of 1920s highlife: fancy dress balls, beach huts and swimsuits, cocktails and jazz – at times Scott Fitzgerald is staying at the hotel down the road. Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s canny, conservative dealer, backs up the big spending, encouraging him to trot out easy-on-the-eye charmers to keep Olga in Chanel couture. Not ...”

“... took over his show while he was away. Soon after, Posobiec accompanied the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, to Ukraine. The traditional press corps was replaced with ‘friendly media’.The Gulf of Mexico was now the Gulf of America. The Associated Press, which declined to include the change in their style guide, no longer had a seat on Air Force ...”

“... creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the effects a free-flowing, direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality ...”

“... emails, so he leaves no paper trail.)*In an unusual television advertisement, the six siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for ...”

“... the Negro Intellectual (it is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the ...”

“... definitive edition of Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 ...”

“... the difference between friendly and unfriendly racial discrimination. To echo Justice John Paul Stevens, who in a case in 1995 pointed out the difference between a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and a welcome mat, there is certainly a moral distinction – and there should be a legal distinction – between a sign that says ‘Blacks get out!’ and one ...”

“... London and surrounded by the first terraced houses. On one side of it he built the church of St Paul. It was built, Jones explained, in the Tuscan style, a plain and massive ur-style with overhanging eaves. It was a kind of manifesto, a demonstration of Jones’s need to give architecture a foundation myth and bolster its intellectual and social ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid Blyton period. I sucked and sucked at books for the juice ...”

“... to Smith’s range of allusion – Homer, Pindar, Seneca, Catullus, Wither, Young, Blake, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot and many more. May’s interest in Smith’s performances makes you want to return to her recordings, gets you to think about the kind of life her voice could bring to the poems, and prompts you to consider how ...”

“... who said that in the 1980s the brothers looked like ‘wide boys’ and ‘spivs’. Sir David Scott, the Charterhouse-educated chairman of Ellerman at the time of the takeover, described them as being ‘dressed as for yachting’ (their summer uniform consisted of stripy blazers, white trousers and matching tasselled blue shoes).Having to deal with such ...”

“... but the Guardian isn’t one of those. It doesn’t have investors: it’s owned by a trust, the Scott Trust, forbidden by its charter from selling the organisation to a rival, floating it on the stock market or paying dividends to shareholders. The Guardian doesn’t have licence fee income like the BBC, or state funding like Al-Jazeera and Sputnik, and ...”