“... units are warm places,’ a social worker told me:They have carpets and drawings on the wall. The staff wear their own clothes and are not afraid to give new arrivals a hug. Polmont is grey and clinical. He would have been met and searched by uniformed officers … But it would have been walking into the wing that scared him most: the rows of ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”

“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... get the idea.’ You get the idea. In a play this would count as breaking the fourth wall, but such effects are much more powerful in the theatre, where three walls have actually been provided. In fiction any impression of solidity is a sandcastle built jointly by writer and reader, easily kicked over by either party. Wilful underminings are ...”

“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... is essential. Occupation had always been her standby as it had been that of her father, Leslie Stephen. And words provided it. But if the words of the Diary prove one thing it is that, for a creative artist, they were no substitute for introspection. Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris ...”

“... were brought up in Burlingame, a suburb which she skewered in her novel The Road through the Wall (1948), peopling it with near indistinguishable snobs and bullies. The first book, she would tell her own children, is your revenge on your parents: once it’s out of your system you can get on with the real writing. When Jackson was a teenager, they moved ...”

“... barrier, that sacred and potent thing, profoundly respected inside banking, a ‘Chinese wall’. So nothing like this can ever happen! Except that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told Michael Lewis: ‘When I hear “Chinese ...”

“... revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara desert to keep out refugees.*Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Matthew Albence, deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), repeats his earlier statement that the child migrant detention centres are like ...”

“... projects or an industrial policy to match those of China and Germany. Instead, it was Wall Street that profited in its role as the chief conduit of global finance – opening a third front in the class war.Clearly this system, if one can call it that, delivers significant benefits for some parties. The regime in China can claim the legitimacy that ...”

“... across from the Houses of Parliament, stretching the length of the Albert Embankment, is a wall of poppy-red hearts, placed there for Covid victims, as a tribute and an accusation. Nudged against Westminster Bridge, Chinese wedding couples, with brides in flowing white, are being arranged against their chosen London backdrop for a nuptial video.The ...”

“... context is the ability to detect subtle changes of attitude on the other side, small cracks in the wall of Arab hostility surrounding Israel which might provide an opening for accommodation and peace. As Yehoshafat Harkabi, the outspokenly dovish former head of military intelligence, observed, ‘knowing your enemy’ must include the ability to know when the ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom ...”

“... he has to give. For Rossetti holds us in the same way we are held by the restless and brilliant Stephen Dedalus, who was – as he told Mr Deasy – a ‘learner’ rather than a teacher. To read or look at his work is to enter a demanding intellectual force-field. Unlike his greatly gifted but undemonstrative sister, Dante Gabriel’s work is driven by ...”

“... future: ‘Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates washed by machinery; not an aeroplane to vex us; all liberated; made whole.’ We are in a better position than Woolf and her first readers to mark the mixture of accuracy and mistake in that prophecy. In this new ‘real ...”