“... this poem and Milton’s are about the drowning of a man not especially close to the ambitious young mourner, whose grief is learned and elaborate. The Lowell elegy has almost as much, if a more rebarbative, music. It pursues a meditation on the ocean, and on Captain Ahab’s mad encounter with his whale – a matter in which the poet did not lose interest ...”

“... the scene of Wilson, now famous, returning to Pittsburgh in 2003 for the funeral of his homie Rob Penny, only to have the Penny family bar him from speaking. ‘August … had been silenced because of his own success,’ she writes. But why the annihilating envy? Hartigan tells us that Penny had preceded Wilson at Central Catholic, that he was a track ...”

“... recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David ...”

“... cannot look long at Aesop, Mars and Don Juan of Austria without their faces being shadowed by the young rifleman’s in Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda, off to the left, his green jacket and trousers an irresistible punctuation mark in the painting’s wall of browns. And I cannot take stock of the rifleman – his look out of the illusion, his exchange of ...”

“... workshops at colleges and universities. (Even in his worst dope-fiend days he had enjoyed tutoring young saxophonists.) He played in Japan in the late 1970s and developed there a new and enraptured cadre of fans. ‘My reception,’ he notes in a revealing aside at the end of his memoir, ‘was overwhelming and frightening. I feel a strong obligation to return ...”

“... the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism as a ...”

“... sanitary and convenience products spewing into London’s river. Taylor Geall, the bright young fabulist charged by his Super Sewer employers, Tideway, with selling an upbeat message about reconnecting Londoners with the Thames (even when large sections of river frontage were closed off for the construction), commutes from Bognor Regis. His repurposed ...”

“... called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a brisk-moving young Portuguese priest. He is taking a picture of her? She wore her black jumpsuit that morning, so she fits the dress code for Ladies from the ankles up, but she alone in the Sistine Chapel is wearing Birkenstocks. ‘That’s what she should be ...”

“... in a Guardian video broadcast, then on mobiles, and a gathering number of viewer/readers – all young, with the intense expressions of actors showing how focused they are on something important – responding with a flood of thoughtful, polite, informed challenges to or endorsements of the Guardian’s first draft of history. ‘This isn’t right. The ...”

“... in Paris during the German occupation’ (Resistance party?), he became the lover of Christine, a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s ...”

“... camp in El Salvador, where they are tortured and sexually abused. The murder of the movie director Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son is explained away by Trump as a product of Reiner’s hatred of him. The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis by federal agents is justified as a response to ‘domestic terrorism’. To quote a line from one of ...”

“... troupe. ‘It’s just nice to be looked at,’ said Delia, ‘even as a specimen. How often do young people ever look at you? At our age we’re invisible.’ Though their paths only occasionally crossed and few people at the hospital knew of their extramural association it happened this morning that Laura was in the class where Mrs Donaldson was ...”

“... without looking anything up, just from pre-existing fragments, I produce a figure who is no longer young, yet lean and agile, almost acrobatic. Sometimes he’s scruffy, unshaven, morose, clad in leather and chain mail; at other times, oddly well groomed, smiling, fey, in a tight-fitting pantomime costume of bright green and a jaunty hat with a feather. He ...”

“... creed was not openly endorsed by Fairbairn’s successor as Tory candidate, a generally pitied young lad called John Godfrey. However, he did open up by routinely denouncing the Nationalists as Nazis, and the Tory campaign as a whole did little to redeem government fortunes. In fact all it did was mimic them, staggering from one gaffe to another like a ...”

“... a big middle-aged man in a raincoat, who said he was a detective sergeant, and a sensitive-looking young constable in uniform, who didn’t say anything at all. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said Mr Ransome. ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘We would have been earlier but there was a slight ... ah, glitch as they say. Rang the wrong doorbell. The fault of ...”