“... the only regular service offered here. Ignoring the ancient injunction bidding them from the wall to ‘Commit no nuisance,’ these time-honoured figures stage a performance of their own. They hurl insults at the concertgoers, begging money from them obscenely, and urinating over their smart cars. My sleeve was taken by a man who dragged me into the ...”

“... for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal ...”

“... pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an ...”

“... expected to live through a Kaiserschnitt. How could she? You have to open not only the abdominal wall but also the uterus, with no anaesthetics, no antisepsis and no practice. It caused a good deal of comment in the Middle Ages that although Caesar was called a caeso matris utero, ‘from the cut womb of his mother’, Suetonius remarked that Caesar’s ...”

“... important and when a college or livery company does feel the need to keep the line of faces on the wall up to date, additions look sheepish, like members of a wedding party not used to their morning-coats. Funnel points out that contemporary press accounts of Millais stress his manliness. He dressed (and hunted and fished) like a gentleman. He was a ...”

“... canvases visible, he used to keep one of his earliest abstractions, Number 22, 1949, against a wall in a narrow storage area. This early essay into a kind of limitless space, with huge areas of floating yellow and orange, interrupted only by a red band straddling the canvas from side to side, shocked unaccustomed eyes. Rothko had not quite reached the ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...”

“... true. ‘Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.’ The recurrence of Henry’s song goes along with some artful thoughts about the relationship between manuscript poetry and the relatively new medium of print. Ballads about the king and Anne are printed, and the king insists that their author should be ...”

“... the infamous, often unsung verse suggesting that all property is theft: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was made for you and me. And so an angry song of protest and a hymn to trespass became part of a celebration of the American ...”

“... suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ‘essential liberty’ for ‘a little temporary safety’. According ...”

“... curtly dismissed by Reeve as corrupt in more than a thousand places. Its joint dedication to King Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, which Faletra regards as ‘savvy marketing’ by Geoffrey, is likewise dismissed as a ‘clumsy adjustment’ of the original one, to Robert and Count Waleran of Meulan. Faletra might well feel sore that Wright, having edited ...”

“... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...”

“... who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral decay of Western civilisation (channelling Pat ...”

“... the bend in the river, a shape that gives purpose to an inadequately defined horizon. On the wall of the pub is a map of the area from the pre-Dome period: a Guide to the Thames (by Catamaran Cruises). This improved landscape cuts directly from the Royal Naval College to the Thames Barrier, so that the peninsula is not merely occulted, it doesn’t ...”