“... on 78 records, 48 of them LPs. The compliments paid to him have been extravagant and impressive. Michael Foot sees resemblances to both Chaplin and Swift, describing him as ‘a comic genius’. The tribute is topped by Robert Graves, for whom Spike is ‘a great genius’. The Monty Python team are cited as finding him not just the original precursor of ...”

“... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...”

“... he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more ...”

“... forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would ...”

“... people of all ages.’ Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in ...”

“... When, at the beginning of the canto, ‘self-exiled Harold wanders forth again,’ the young hero finds himself, not coincidentally, ‘upon this place of skulls,/The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo’. Why not glimpse personal calamity in a generation’s burial place? (‘He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward ...”

“... in AI is rather wonderful. I only wish I had a clearer idea about how we should be educating the young people who come to us, now that so many of the skills we teach are susceptible to ...”

“... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...”

“... father has left the room – being there was only ever a prelude to leaving – and I sit alone, a young girl, listening with mounting anxiety to the sound of a Romanian pan flute. This is the music of restless souls – urgent, melancholic skids in a minor key, an unending complaint so depressing at times that one of its greatest exponents, Rezső ...”

“... defends her interpretation, but allows that others are equally valid. Seyrig interjects: as a young woman, she argues, Jeanne might have thought that having a husband and child and keeping house would bring her happiness. This is too much interpretation for Akerman, who wants to continue her plot summary. Things start to go awry for Jeanne when she ...”

“... be felt, five of the six men who were ambushed and shot were unarmed at the time; and a sixth – Michael Tighe, shot dead in the barn – had no paramilitary connections. John Stalker’s special brief was to determine the involvement of the RUC in these events. One of the most disquieting revelations made in the press has been the degree to which the ...”

“... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...”

“... sort, he soaked himself in opera, and grew confident, though possibly no more than many other young men, of some sort of future greatness. At 20, having moved with the family to London, he was ghosting music criticism for Lee and writing stories, book reviews and part of a play about Jesus. The ‘pale, private Shaw’ he then was decided to be a ...”

“... in Time of Civil War’ for jolting us with images of violence (‘That dead young soldier in his blood’) even as it notices the sociable honey-bees building in the masonry of Thoor Ballylee. Yeats’s wide-angled truthfulness to the realities and potentialities of life is secured, for Heaney, by the buoyant in-placeness of a style ...”

“... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...”