“... In late​ 2016, David Sedaris attended a piano recital delivered by his longtime partner, Hugh. Hugh had practised with obsessive intensity for many hours a day, but ultimately performed poorly, disappointing himself in front of a room full of his fellow students and their parents. ‘I’ve never seen him so vulnerable,’ Sedaris wrote that night in his diary, excerpted here in a second curated volume of entries, which he has said are a small fraction of the nearly ten million words he has ‘handwritten or typed’ as part of this project since 1977 ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... secret police chief, Beria, Stalin finally ordered the Tatars to be deported. On the night of 18 May 1944, the NKVD rounded up more than 200,000 Tatars, including invalids, the elderly, children, women and even those who had fought for the Red Army and the partisans. Given only a few minutes’ notice, they were transported in wooden cattle cars east to the ...”

“... for a poet who ‘appears to have been born in 1870/and schooled in 1689’, a feeling that may account for Ní Chuilleanáin’s more Jacobite tendencies. Few poets’ work has more visions of lost realms and kings o’er the water, held tight in the embrace of a history that forgets nothing without ever properly getting started: ‘no unformed ...”

“... river, as if he had sometimes been unsure of where he was going, undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later ...”

“... of working-class housing, or on the conservative culture of the London working class. The author may feel that it is up to his readers to contextualise and evaluate this material, to provide their own framework within which to assess its novelty and significance: but he is surely the best qualified person to do this, and it is much to be regretted that he ...”

“... at the Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility ...”

“... the media and the political interests that so often govern them. Evidence of death and destruction may be immediate, flashed across the world in real time by the major networks as on 11 September 2001, or it may take time to be sifted through alternative websites and sources (easier to access in some places than ...”

“... what the term actually means. Instead, we try to make sense of it in conjunction with words that may come with it, and which we can understand well enough on their own – words like ‘welfare’, ‘intervention’, ‘sanction’, ‘control’, ‘security’. During the Eighties the key words were ...”

“... an extended consciousness of one’s fate and the ability to articulate it for others. So tragedy may seem, to some of the critics Eagleton takes to task, the wrong word for the experience of those who died. But this must surely be false. While some will have died instantly others must have had time for conscious reflection. Certainly, most of those in the ...”

“... Normandy with a dream of being brave, a smart looker on his arm. Rewatching these films today, we may wonder how aware Bogart and Bacall were of what they were up to. Call it art or propaganda – but for a time the two of them fell for it, as if they were watching their own movie. The best film stars are so often their first audiences. So it was with these ...”

“... the Communist Party as a career move: ‘You will meet big people.’ By the end of that year, David Platt, the Daily Worker’s movie reviewer (a witness frequently summoned by Hoberman for counterpoint), announced that ‘never before in the history of the screen have there been so many forward-looking people in positions of responsibility as in ...”

“... in Parliament it has triumphed over the odds, largely thanks to bloody-minded commando raids by David Owen, who has been the one politician consistently able to score off Thatcher. In the opinion polls it has been back at the levels of the General Election campaign. Moreover, whenever there has been a real election, the Alliance has beaten the polls in a ...”

“... miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”

“... the active line comes into being. ‘It goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly.’ The camera may appear to survey a terrain. But there is nothing to stop the viewer’s eye going out for a walk along the tracks laid down by the countless overlapping material histories embedded within it.Klee also imagined a different kind of active line: one that is ...”