“... 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 ...”

“... looking.’ Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ on the eve of the Spartacist uprising. We read it now with knowledge of the uprising’s brutal outcome, but we can still register Luxemburg’s passionate endorsement of the energy and potential of the people. She is talking about aliveness – what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons recently described ...”

“... enemies include Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul who likes to buy up writers and corrupt them; Peter Keating, a charming rival damned by too-easy success; Ellis Toohey, an indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... historical frame, above all the Catholic triumphalism manifested in Bernini’s colonnades for St Peter’s piazza or in the impeccably prim altarpieces of Carlo Maratta, the president of the Accademia di San Luca. And so little moved forward in the fractured Italy of those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... me to Marxism than in repelling me from it. I was – I admit it – impressed. And now I read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”

“... attempt to understand, control and make money from risk. The best version of this story is told in Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods (1998), a fascinating account of risk, which makes the point that the study of risk is a humanist project, an attempt to abolish the idea of unknowable fate and replace it with the rational, quantifiable study of chance. The ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... very last executive orders signed by Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov’ – followed by a very long speech read at top speed by Gekhayev, repeating the list of successes in the style of a bureaucratic report. The speech concludes abruptly; immediately changing his bearing, smiling inanely, Gekhayev adds in a tone at once embarrassed and fawning: ‘You might be ...”