“... high-spirited comedy, Crampton Hodnet, set among scholars, spinsters and clergy. The agent who read it thought the story and its characters tame. ‘Can you imagine an old spinster,’ Pym wrote to friends, ‘frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked?’Pym was 37 and still single when a much-revised version of her roman-à-clef was finally ...”

“... net cast by most postmodernist critics (myself included): Dennis Oppenheim rather than Richard Serra, say, Gretchen Bender rather than Cindy Sherman. Although written by a critic in formation, these early texts anticipate many of his later concerns, especially when it comes to artists focused on perception and technology, from Blake and Turner to ...”

“... resulted in a small goldmine of sources in the National Archives, well exploited by Braddick as by Richard Evans in his biography of Hill’s comrade, Eric Hobsbawm. In this respect, biographers of leading left-wing figures have an advantage that those who write about less suspect individuals can only envy.Khrushchev’s revelations in February 1956 about the ...”

“... the patrician shades of the 15th century: ‘In the hundreds of archival documents that have been read – and in the thousands that have not – the voices of the dead live on.’Warburg’s Renaissance characters were composed of diverse cultural inheritances, which they fought to hold in balance. Having scoured inventories, he knew of the large quantity of ...”

“... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...”

“... DfE would lift the threat it had made to pull the plug on the charity’s funding. If you want to read Alam’s very thoughtful and interesting 2007 booklet, you won’t find it on the MCB website any more (you can find it, sandwiched between slabby redacted wodges, at the end of the Kershaw report). Since 1 September last year, Park View has had a new ...”

“... million masks a day to the US. He received no response.The president says: ‘I learned a lot from Richard Nixon … I study history.’With the high rate of infections and deaths among Native Americans, Doctors without Borders is sending teams into the Navajo Nation, where healthcare is gravely inadequate. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux set up ...”

“... head of the Church of England. Nine out of ten economists. Stephen Hawking, Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Branson – truly great Britons who so many people admire and respect. ‘Maybe it’s a conspiracy,’ I would say. ‘Or maybe all these people are right.’This is disingenuous. First, the case being made was rarely about the merits of Remain; it was ...”

“... a cartography of casual detail, whatever he wanted to notice in a drift across the city: ‘You read handbills catalogues posters singing aloud.’ The Shoreditch Town Hall zone is more wary: ‘No Dogs (Except Guide Dogs)’ and a cute little silver postbox placed at the right of the entrance to swallow cigarette stubs. Buzzed into the grand hall, the ...”

“... the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us ...”

“... Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW ...”

“... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...”

“... the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in the Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston – herself once a fixture in the New York art world – described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find ...”

“... Satanic Verses came from sensitivity to the feelings of an audience that would never be tempted to read it. The charge was no less imposing for that; the book was said to cause an injury, a wound – the relevant claim is that wrong words or gestures can amount to aggressive misrepresentation or ‘misrecognition’. The Satanic Verses, in one of its multiple ...”

“... most obsessions, this one took a while to get going. In my twenties, as a literature student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my ...”