“... of what happens ‘where the lyrical I goes to the objects to caress them with language’. There may be charm in such work, he says, but it will necessarily ‘lack … the greatness of true downfalls’. He is not thinking specifically about Auschwitz, but the connection is easily made. A great deal of lyric poetry, especially of the civilised-barbaric ...”

“... we “hear” is our own ventriloquising of ambiguously directed address, though we may, and in some cases certainly do, construe this as overhearing a distinctive poetic voice.’ So Frank O’Hara addresses a leaf: ‘Leaf! You are so big!/How can you change your/colour, then just fall!’ and John Ashbery talks to a fictional reader who is ...”

“... leave France as the only member of the EU capable of deploying significant military power. Merkel may well be right in saying, as she did recently, that Europe can no longer rely on the US for military protection. But Europe cannot protect itself when Germany has only four serviceable military planes and at the end of last year hadn’t a single operational ...”

“... led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken in 2017: that the only serious challenger would be Le Pen, and that by dramatising the choice between his own list ...”

“... cut to Irishness – shamrocks, Guinness, lots of green things – while a little more knowledge may attach to him the legend that he is responsible for Ireland’s lack of snakes, having ordered them all to leave. The picture becomes more complicated for those who have discovered that he wasn’t Irish at all but from somewhere in the island of ...”

“... Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous consequences: he renounced the fictional space and limited the dramatic power of painting; what ...”

“... off the social underworld and exposing its squalor, was somehow inherently subversive. Behind this may lie the assumption that people in the overworld are as conservative as they are only because they don’t know about the sordid lives which others are forced to lead, which is far too charitable a view of them. Isn’t it bad enough that everyday existence is ...”

“... was 25 at the time, but the adolescent cast of this and many other letters written in his twenties may come as a surprise to those who know only the superbly controlled ironist of the published works. So may his taste for Swinburne, who evidently spoke to Strachey’s own tendency to luxuriate in suffering. (His hatred of ...”

“... to effect this wide ranging co-ordination. In fact, as Weber demonstrates, the second question may be harder to understand than the first, for by carefully unpacking the particulars of individual motivation, it becomes clearer what drives the sharing economy as a whole. Most developers, Weber observes, code FLOSS projects to fix a problem they are ...”

“... spitefully and with anger’. Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion, who may be a spy working for the British against the Republicans. What she wants most, though, is a role in the conflict going on around her. At one point she throws herself onto the ground in front of a Republican activist shouting: ‘Oh God, make use of me or I ...”

“... about the room; a pair of shoes on the dining-room table. And what we regard as dirt someone else may prize; dirt is not natural but cultural. The move from the material to the metaphorical and cultural was often a short step; consider the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’, where new immigrants from Europe ...”

“... dubious Popular Front Air Minister, whose help was spurned by de Gaulle in 1940. The collapse of May-June 1940 transformed him. At a time when most provincial prefects, a majority of Parisians, and eight million French citizens fled mindlessly southward before the invading Germans, Moulin stayed on in Chartres. There, he was impressed by the behaviour of the ...”

“... you come to feel that the characters are really doing something quite old-fashioned. They may be media savvy and product-articulate, these yellow-faced goons, but in essence they go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people rolling in the aisles of the music halls. Homer Simpson is a kind of Grimaldi, an air-guitar-playing, nacho-chomping ...”

“... was the absence of testimony by agents. Yet written materials of sufficient quantity and authority may have a credibility that only the most reliable of witnesses could claim. The committee staff reviewed more than six million pages of CIA documents, while also drawing on an earlier CIA inspector general’s report. A wrangle over agency requests for ...”

“... cash for clothes and clubbing. The young with the energy to get out of their beds, that is. In May 2011, two days before the election, I could find not one poster in a window, not one canvasser on a sunny street. And yet each lamppost was decorated with little flags for each of the four contesting parties – as if the council had been told to mark the ...”