“... that he’d spent time in Rhodesia and asked him about it. He worked in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a young soil scientist preventing earth on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and ...”

“... in the fray, or overgrown men, or anguished suburbanites, or strange little boys, or raw-looking young Americans alone with themselves, or Upper East Side ladies. (When Arbus photographed such a lady she had encountered in Central Park, making her appear very morose indeed, a friend who knew the woman reacted with shock: ‘I had never seen [her] look like ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... to provide centres of collective life’, shaping the sensibilities of bored dreamers such as the young Tynan. Much like the giant Birminghams of the settler colonies, the city came to suffer from an intense ‘cultural cringe’. The semi-proletarian novelists of the Birmingham Group, including Walter Allen, Walter Brierley, Leslie Halward and John ...”

“... Aside from that, JFK seems to be a commercial success, drawing large audiences, especially of young people who have no memory of the assassination, who emerge from this film, not simply convinced that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, but engaged in arguments, asking questions, sometimes even talking to their parents about this event. The film has carved ...”

“... of the picture I retained of him from childhood when I saw Korda’s wartime propaganda film The Young Mr Pitt. Robert Donat was Pitt, kitted out with a kindly housekeeper, adoring chums and maybe even a girlfriend. What there was no sign of was the bottle. At one point in the play he talks of when he was a boy, though boy ...”

“... chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably courageous thing to do. Macmillan never forgot it. Profumo then proceeded to enjoy a notably good war, serving first as an air intelligence liaison officer during the Battle of Britain, before seeing action in the battle of ...”

“... of the duke of Saxony, but reserves a special half-contemptuous pity for ‘Falconbridge, the young baron of England’. He is, admittedly, good-looking, but has no proper national dress, wearing instead a German bonnet, an Italian doublet and French hose. Despite this outfit he is fatally parochial, the monoglot speaker of an obscure offshore language no ...”

“... were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same ...”

“... for anyone who has not done it. We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early ...”

“... Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is ...”

“... last year, one of its readers, the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, remembered that he had heard a young Australian called Sam Lucas play an instrument that met Kennedy’s description of Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a ...”

“... Recent years have seen a spate of biographies of China’s 20th-century leaders, including Robert L. Suettinger’s Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled ...”

“... other Jews. She had decided to rejoin the partisans in the mountains, when a deputation of three young Jews came to see her. ‘Can your conscience,’ they asked, ‘bear the thought that in order to go and join the partisans, you will be sacrificing thirty other people? If you go, we shall all be shot.’ She stayed, was imprisoned with the rest, and in ...”

“... the most unified of the slice books. It could well be read beside The Fatal Shore, complementing Robert Hughes’s information on convict life, extending the colonial landscapes, and importantly correcting Hughes’s simplistic view of the Aborigines.* When everything has been said about the ordeals of the convicts, their endurance and labour, and the ways ...”