“... Faust.Meanwhile, the poet encounters a fisherman on the banks of a river wearing a mask. ‘One day this song will be merely/puzzling,’ she tells herself. ‘What did they mean by a mask?’ they’ll say. Is this a kind of optimism? It’s one way to grapple with the present – imagining a future.‘The Horseshoe Crab’ is a tender meditation on the ...”

“... a copse in East Anglia where he fully expects to see a red-breasted flycatcher one coming autumn day. The jacket photo shows a bearded man partly concealed by a reedbed, wearing binoculars and a green cap, standing to a curious half-attention. It is like a picture of a first meeting with a member of a previously unencountered tribe, a birder fresh from the ...”

“... 1974, Tony Benn was appointed Secretary of State at the Department of Industry. On his first day in the office he was greeted by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Anthony Part, with the words: ‘I presume, Secretary of State, that you do not intend to implement the industrial strategy in Labour’s programme.’ When Benn said he did indeed intend to ...”

“... then the rest of the town) on fire. Those residents of Oradour who had been away for the day, or had managed to escape the round-up, returned to a blackened scene. André Desourteaux had been away, working for the postal service in Limoges. Nine members of his family were among the 642 people who died. Only five of the men in the village ...”

“... news                                (‘New York’)False history gets made all day, any day,the truth of the new is never on the news                                (‘Turning the Wheel’)There is a cop who is both prowler and father …You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the ...”

“... runs the caption: ‘I am a thorough student, and when I feel I must have solitude, I take a day in the country – with my books.’ Another caption reads: ‘“Hullo! My dear fellow”: Lord Tod Wadley greets a friend.’Wadley functioned for Carstairs as mascot, fetish and alter ego – as a miniature externalisation of her own glamorous, if ...”

“... his customary grumpiness. He had reason enough to be low-spirited: he had rectal cancer, and each day brought grim news from the front; yet, despite it all, he managed to compose. The completion of En blanc et noir broke a long creative drought and ushered in the last flowering of his genius, before illness made serious work impossible. The first movement of ...”

“... visible, in the antechamber to his tower study: In the year of our Lord 1571, aged 38, on the day before the calends of March, the anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the court, the servitude of the Parlement and public offices, still in the prime of life, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where, in peace and ...”

“... allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is ...”

“... have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military dictatorship then, about 150,000 people marched through the streets of Lahore. Our government supported the British, which provoked a wave of anger against them. ‘Does independence mean nothing? We’re still ...”

“... Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong.’ Rooks caw speculatively on the wind, and the weather is appropriately Gothic too, a ‘bitter cold’ February day with ‘vicious showers of ...”

“... found in our Old Testament as if it were Scripture is disconcerting (John 7.37-40): ‘In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water ...”

“... in simpler style: pouting and slouching with an unnaturally dark mop. They form a night and day – the bright inviting magazine cover and the sulky dark advertisement – but they work in the same manner; the syntax where a stance signifies a mood and an expression sets the scene. The cover tells us that spring is here (pinks), that playfulness is à ...”

“... page of her introduction contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass scolding on the left – you could call it ‘cancel ...”

“... electricity generators … while the garbage was mounting everywhere, spreading its putrid smell day after day after day.’Both Atiyah and Saghie were remembering a dark past at a moment when prospects looked brighter. Atiyah was writing in 1946, as the French army was departing from ...”