“... Denis Donoghue begins, a little self-indulgently, by reprinting six short BBC talks on ‘Words’. The excuse is that such radio talks offer a simple if incomplete model for Donoghue’s conception of literary discourse: as an address to an invisible audience, or dialogue for ever aborted by the absence of a second party ...”

“... cards in order to gain access through these checkpoints. Locations of the checkpoints are still to be determined. The notice quickly spread beyond the university. For months Occupy organisers had been planning three days of ‘Education, Celebration and Resistance’ to honour the movement’s first birthday. The events would culminate in mass civil ...”

“... and facial features poking out through the sand that wonder and amazement were sometimes preceded by horror and fear, when their discoverers thought they had stumbled across a newly deposited corpse in a dumping ground for mafia murderers. Just such a newly emergent masterpiece fills the first room, the central rotunda of the Royal Academy: the larger than ...”

“... as much as any thought of scientific ownership. He knew, however, that before such pleasure could be communicated, the species under examination must be given a scientific name. The ritual of identification has rules. For example, no animal or plant has been allowed more than one scientific name since Linnaeus established ...”

“... Temple of Apollo’ after Claude Lorrain by William Woollett (1760) Among various unforgettable moments in a life much of which has been spent thinking about landscape in literature and the visual arts was a remark made ten years ago by Kirsty Wark in the programme which follows Newsnight on Fridays, in which she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain ...”

“... debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was ...”

“... If​ Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left few areas of life in the UK wholly untouched even though the EU can only legislate in areas for which it derives what are known as ‘competences’ from the treaties member states have ratified ...”

“... is destroyed’, he told an audience in 1882, ‘capital will not flow, enterprise cannot be created, wages must fall, and commerce must stagnate’. It was a neat formulation, deployed to dent the case for radical reforms that would, in the Tory worldview, destabilise the polity by setting ‘class against ...”

“... this frantic exercise in ‘resilience planning’, my mind drifted back to a time still unblessed by the wisdom of Dominic Raab, the former Brexit secretary, who shortly before the end of his tenure admitted how little he had appreciated the country’s reliance on transportation by the Dover-Calais route. A simpler ...”

“... The​ city of Minneapolis, in which George Floyd lived and died, has been plagued not only by Covid-19 but also by an epidemic of police violence. As Mike Griffin, a community organiser, put it, he was ‘just as likely to die from a cop as from Covid’. Major news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, seemed astonished at the scale of structural and environmental racism exposed by the pandemic ...”

“... Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of Strachan’s in KwaZulu-Natal, where the author himself has lived much of his life ...”

“... their fantasy of frontier settlement and biblical prophecy was being played out, and they will be blind to the fact that they will now be living amid the ruins of the homes of their former neighbours. The Jewish settlers who lived illegally in Gaza will be handsomely compensated (an ...”

“... to expose the secrets of Whitehall while the story was still hot, they were strongly aroused by the sight of naked acts of power, and thrilled to bits by their own part in the proceedings. With the diaries of Leopold Stennett Amery we return to the politics of an era whose revelations are chiefly of interest to ...”

“... this ‘such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: it cannot be right these actions should go any further’. Royal Commissions, ad hoc inquiries into a defined issue, were not in fashion at the time. The last one had been held fourteen years earlier. But the Conservative home secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced on the day ...”

“... compounds harmaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Their textiles and ceramics are characterised by kené, geometric patterns that represent the life energy of the ayahuasca plants, which are absorbed by those who drink the brew. Kené means simply ‘design’, but the patterns themselves are far from simple, with thick ...”