“... yes, he did keep writing, there’s a lot of material, and, yes, it will be published.’ Jerome David Salinger the man is a tough subject to write about. The original four books delve deep into matters of love and religion, with breathtaking intimacy. The sense of family – and of higher knowledge – is all ...”

“... Over Sixty Hours without an Execution.’ When PM, the biggest tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, can’t find a corpse to put on its front page, it has to come up with something. On 21 November last year it announced that ‘the city has just experienced an unusual outbreak of peace … the longest for three years. Newspaper statistics show that from 29 December 2008, fifty hours passed without a killing ...”

“... described Nureyev ‘making peeeteeyous Russky noises’ about joining the company. But ‘Mrs K says defunutely: Nyet.’ The dance critics Arnold Haskell and John Martin denounced his ‘tragic’ mistake, his lamentable disloyalty. An article appeared in Izvestia under the name of Serge Lifar, the same Lifar who had awarded Nureyev the Nijinsky ...”

“... By the time​ he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: he had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it. The literary movement he’d launched half a century earlier – the nouveau roman – had ground to a halt. The new novel – anti-psychological and anti-expressive, stripped of individualised characters, temporal continuity and meaning itself – was no longer new ...”

“... of the band, available on the classic three-CD set Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band). ‘Ko-Ko’, from the first recording session and one of its greatest works (no relation to Charlie Parker’s ‘Koko’), opens with an aggressive, almost defiant plunger solo by Nanton, as if to say: musical advances aren’t ...”

“... carved on the headstone. A memorial to Lady Wilde was incorporated into the family grave in Mount Jerome in Dublin in 1996 and a headstone erected over her grave in Kensal Green in London in 2000. In 1995, Oscar Wilde was included in a window in Westminster Abbey. As the centenary of his death approached, statues to ...”

“... Europe is ill​ . How seriously, and why, are matters not always easy to judge. But among the symptoms three are conspicuous, and inter-related. The first, and most familiar, is the degenerative drift of democracy across the continent, of which the structure of the EU is at once cause and consequence. The oligarchic cast of its constitutional arrangements, once conceived as provisional scaffolding for a popular sovereignty of supranational scale to come, has over time steadily hardened ...”