“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”

“... my most spiritual film.’ ‘Elaborate on that.’ ‘No.’) In an early short, The Alphabet, a young girl is hounded by the ABCs – ‘a little nightmare about the fear connected with learning’.But Lynch did have a distinctive approach to language; there were the mantric repeated phrases in each film, the backwards speech of Twin Peaks, and his own way ...”

“... for some of the distinctiveness of The Floor Scrapers, Luncheon and The House Painters, and of Young Man at His Window (1876), with its large and inauspicious foreground of carpet, chair, glass door and chunky balustrade, which ultimately serves to emphasise the relationship between the figure of René Caillebotte – off-centre, seen from behind, his ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...”

“... to hate him, to see him as a child-killing monster, but instead I found a rattled, frightened young man, short, slight, and so pale that the bluish veins on his neck and shoulders were visible.’ After a long bourbon-soaked conversation, Calley interrupted Hersh’s questioning to phone the man who had been his immediate superior in Vietnam, Captain ...”

“... that I know many felt at being involved in futile wars, badly run and heartbreakingly wasteful in young lives and treasure’. Another officer, still serving, recalled the ‘cognitive dissonance in London’ at the time of the Iraq denouement in 2008: ‘The refusal on the part of senior officers and officials even to admit that we had been found wanting and ...”

“... cursed with a chronic liver condition. He died in 1930 at the age of 26. For someone who died so young, his list of achievements is nothing short of amazing. In pure mathematics, he is famous for two theorems about combinations which now form the starting-point for what is known as ‘Ramsey Theory’; in economics, he is acknowledged as providing the ...”

“... may be yet. The closest parallels to Aids in epidemiological terms are syphilis and Hepatitis B. Michael Adler, in Aids and the Epidemics of History, lists the sudden appearance of syphilis (at the end of the 15th century), its asymptomatic carrier state and predominantly sexual means of transmission as the chief points of similarity. Hepatitis B, as Baruch ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...”

“... as it runs the risk of exposing the criminality of the state. ‘Criminalisation by the state,’ Michael Grewcock writes, with reference to equally dire migrant policies in Australia, ‘is integral to legitimising criminal activity by the state.’ The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern ...”

“... from Covid-19 are older people, the lockdown is an intolerable encroachment on the liberty of the young. A more serious argument might ask where the limits of acceptable risk lie, or might consider – in a pandemic future – whether mass medical surveillance by the state, from automated temperature readings to contagion tracing by phone tracking, is worth ...”

“... in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the ...”