“... secreted by the mother for herself and her eggs, a kind of hatchery. It would be a challenge to read it without thinking of Mary recalling Marianne to the shell and the pair crawling inside like two cephalopods recolonising the nursery. The first stanza speaks of entrapment but in the last lines the argonaut clinging to its little edifice suggests that ...”

“... the army and was posted to Verona. A friend suggested that he visit Sirmione on Lake Garda and read Pound’s celebration of it, ‘Blandula, Tenula, Vagula’. Pound’s poem begins: ‘What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?’ The question longs to be rhetorical – what could be more lovely than the spot he’s in? – but the longing isn’t wholly ...”

“... put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will be long remembered and sadly missed not only by them but by the regiment and at the club. Always one for a joke, Stubby combined unswerving loyalty with a ...”

“... for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the outer darkness, while their more glamorous colleagues, hotfoot from Paris or New Haven, brought the resources of narratology or postcolonial studies to bear on the novel.Where did this current spring from? Since three of ...”

“... primitive predication’, and we are seriously asked to shed a tear on Sitwell’s behalf when we read that ‘from 1941 to 1949, he experienced the painful wartime dearth of clothing, cigarettes and gasoline, as well as coal for heating and gas for cooking. And worse, he suffered powerfully from the abeyance of ...”

“... the sum of its inspired moments, leaving in its wake an aura, an echo; this is prose meant to be read aloud, as an expression of ‘voice’, not a resolution of plot. Paley’s characterisations are by way of monologues we hear, not individuals we see. (we ‘see’ virtually no one in these hundreds of pages of prose, have little idea what Faith looks ...”

“... banks or fuel poverty, without a bedroom tax or two-child benefit cap, Boris Johnson or Brexit, Donald Trump or Tommy Robinson; without a public sector staffing crisis, crumbling hospitals, collapsing schools or overcrowded prisons. Most important of all, for readers looking for an alternative reality in September 2020, it’s also a world without ...”

“... Connor. The two men still detest each other from that period, and neither of them seems to have read anything except the Bible (or ‘the babble’, as they both call it) since. Falwell, though still able to please a racialist crowd while later saying, ‘Who, me?’, now claims to have been delivered by the Lord from his earlier segregationist ...”

“... appearance in any of these shows – none has exactly been a retrospective – are her films about Donald Crowhurst, who set off from Devon in 1968 in his trimaran Teignmouth Electron to circumnavigate the globe single-handed, but kept reporting false co-ordinates before disappearing and leaving his boat adrift. Those mesmerising, melancholy films were at the ...”

“... Stefan Collini has made his reputation as the historian of late 19th-century sociological thought. Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though ...”

“... Listen to Jonathan Meades introduce and read this piece on the LRB PodcastAsneaked photograph​ from the earliest years of this century shows the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney leading his parents out of the sea on a Mexican beach. They are about to move into an unknown world, where they will, all three, lurch from idolisation to easy prey, from objects of pity to mean-spirited envy – the adolescent has a gift, the elders have his blood ...”

“... Throughout the time that he was Prime Minister Clement Attlee read only the Times. He was, he said, too busy to bother with other newspapers. The fact that the Times was firmly Tory and, after a few years of Labour Government, almost hysterically anti-socialist, didn’t worry him at all. ‘That’s what one expects,’ he said ...”

“... to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a contract’. By the time Donald Rumsfeld was sacked as US defense secretary, there were around 100,000 private contractors working for the US government in Iraq, more than ten times the number in the 1991 Gulf War. Although fewer than a third are in the security business, various US ...”

“... criminals of all kinds. We are taking Mexico’s problems.’Women Trump: ‘Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.’The Morally Concerned Trump: ‘They asked me: “What do you think about waterboarding, Mr ...”