“... quacked like a duck. Above all, it had Cromwell himself. The rough words of command on that April day, the coarse personal abuse, the utter disrespect of custom and ceremony – this is Cromwell. It always was. The capacity for abrupt violence, the words and actions in unnerving sync, this was his shtick, his forte, his USP. And he stayed the same, right to ...”

“... that in that state you are especially likely to see what you expect to see.’ The story is by Barry Pain. Despite the impression which the Oxford Book imparts, ghost stories go back a long way before the 19th century. And so does their authorial explanation. Ghosts are creatures of habit, and of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s play is a ghost story which has ...”

“... also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the effort: Iraq, where the US is not doing well and where the army is made up of ‘volunteers’ from poor economic backgrounds rather than ...”

“... Once again, the idea is to set up constitutional procedures, or something like them, to discipline day-to-day political activity: the state aims to be neutral or impartial between different conceptions of the good life, such as political ideologies or religious creeds. Where it can’t avoid taking a position (as, for ...”

“... he was campaigning to retain the presidency: ‘I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.’) Trump’s denunciations of academia, liberals and protesters echoes Wallace’s angry rhetoric. And students are again protesting about American ...”

“... squares where ordinary Algerians and visitors could watch. The headliners included the R&B singer Barry White and radical artists such as Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. In William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, Shepp can be seen on stage with some Touareg musicians. Ted Joans, introducing him, shouts, ‘Jazz is a Black ...”

“... the Canadian ambassador to quiz the two men in Jordanian custody – ‘Shawn Kendall’ and ‘Barry Beads’ – on their ‘Canadian-ness’. It didn’t take long for them to be exposed as impostors. ‘We did it . . . We sprayed him with a chemical,’ Yatom confessed to Batikhi after landing in Jordan: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it ...”

“... In essence, Fraser’s picture illuminates the aggregates, tables and arguments assembled by Barry Supple in his essay on the same subject in the second volume of Floud and McCloskey. Here is the rise of a mass market, a revolution in retailing, and the transformation of light industry, with results which have lingered until our own ...”

“... Hemingway depicted him in The Sun Also Rises (1926) as the successful writer Bill Gorton. Philip Barry, a Yale classmate, wrote the part of Nick Potter, the socialite hero of his hit comedy, Holiday (1929), with Stewart in mind – and Stewart played the part on Broadway. Between 1930 and 1949 he worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood on 28 movies, including ...”

“... play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald (2004), attempt to untangle the tall tales and lies.Johnson used to be seen as a ‘primitive’, his raw experience unmediated by ...”

“... trompe-l’oeil window grilles, a floor of bumpy flagging. A waiter waltzes up to declaim the day’s specials. His rococo soliloquy is made unintelligible by being delivered, like a piece of 18th-century melodrama, against the ‘Dies Irae’ of the Mozart Requiem. By the time I’m eating the main course, the tape has been changed to the Four Last ...”

“... an independent production company, Kestrel Films, with the sole purpose of bringing to the screen Barry Hines’s as yet unpublished novel A Kestrel for a Knave, a story about the sense of purpose instilled in a much-put-upon school reject by his capture and conscientious training of a falcon. The making of Kes (1969) was, as David Forrest explains in his ...”

“... On 3 March​ 2014, the first day in the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side ...”

“... book again involves a traitor and spans two generations from the Second World War to the present day. The author, who is the Conservative chief whip in the House of Lords, really knows how the upper classes talk and, as a master of deals behind the scenes, has written a story of singular ingenuity and suspense. Probably in revenge for years of listening to ...”

“... and to see him ultimately as a martyr for the cause, a cross between St Sebastian and Kevin Barry, which is how Stephen Rea made him appear in Terry Eagleton’s play St Oscar. Kiberd’s reading remains tentative and convincing, but he is forced to leave a great deal out, such as Wilde’s homosexuality. In taking only the aspects of Wilde and Shaw ...”