“... with little more than his genius and a recommendation for an apprenticeship with the portraitist Peter Lely.) For wealthy gentlemen like Boyle, the pursuit of natural knowledge might be open and generous, but for Hooke the limits to openness and civility were set by the fact that this was his way of making a living: he was one of the first entrepreneurial ...”

“... English was not very good, so we didn’t see much of the neighbours. Tante Biba and Onkel Peter, the friends from Istanbul, lived twenty or thirty miles away, and with them I spoke German. Then on to Bluefield, the ‘air-conditioned city’, where coal poured in from the bituminous fields. It was here that I started to learn English seriously. I ...”

“... is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan affair recedes to the horizon of living memory, revelations and theories once libellous are now printable, while first-hand recollections become clouded and the ...”

“... academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs more than any other book. Raymond Rivers, his biology teacher, stimulated his lifelong enthusiasm for reptiles and amphibians, which reached alarming levels when his bedroom ...”

“... 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 ...”