“... of them. Lying on my back on Chip’s roof, all the memories of my childhood turned white one by one. Clune now teaches English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and has been clean for more than a decade. Accounts of addiction often begin with the first time – Burroughs started Junky with his first opiate experience, ‘during the ...”

“... Modern art​ was born into a market economy, and by the early 20th century it could no longer ignore its commodity status. While some artists sought to escape this condition through abstraction, say, others worked to underscore it with the readymade, an everyday product they simply nominated as an artwork. In its first incarnation, with Dada, this device was taken to be critical of the cultural-economic system in which it was enmeshed, but by the time of Pop such negativity had all but drained away ...”

“... under which Charlie Hebdo was published before it was forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of ...”

“... The​ Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore recently outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history ...”

“... on Virdi’s previous case, I felt a duty to do all I could to prevent what appeared to me to be another witch hunt. Gurpal came into the office and was exactly the way I remembered him at the Hackney Empire, warm and straightforward. The timing of the decision to investigate him was suspicious: Virdi was at this point seeking election as a local ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... on GB News began pulling their ads. The Swedish cider brand Kopparberg was first, followed by a dozen others, including Ikea, Vodafone and the Open University. None said it was boycotting the channel, although this is the way their actions were described both by some supporters and ...”

“... followed the switch from sail to steam (the rate for the journey from Chicago to Liverpool dropped by two-thirds between 1873 and 1884) and the advances in reaping and binding machinery that solved the nagging labour shortage in the Midwest. Grain imports rose from only 2 per cent of Britain’s total supply in the 1830s to 45 per cent in the 1880s (65 per ...”

“... Ennui is French but it is related to annoy, and spree may come from Old Norse, or it may actually be French, an elision of esprit. The OED merely murmurs about the word’s ‘obscure origin’. Still, whatever their derivation, the words do seem to belong to quite different realms of affect and activity, which themselves rest on an old and interesting – if ...”

“... as often) she runs into serious trouble, implicated in a death for which, eventually, a debt must be paid. The setting is luxurious, the lifestyle hedonistic, the climate oppressively hot. Prodigious amounts of alcohol are consumed. As events accelerate towards a violent finale, the reader is kept guessing. How severe will the consequences ...”

“... artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, the first purely digital artwork to be auctioned at Christie’s, on 11 March this year. It sold for $69.3 million, making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s ...”

“... I knew​ very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the first time a matador had died in a professional Spanish bullfight since 1985. I’d spent a number of summers going to corridas when I was researching a book on the cultural politics of Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, and became convinced that bullfighting was an underexplored chapter in this history ...”

“... and schoolmasters who trudged through fields, knocked on doors and filled in paper schedules by hand in exchange for a shilling and sixpence. In 1801, these census enumerators were required only to record the number of men, women and children in each dwelling, and to classify each inhabitant as occupied in ‘agriculture’,‘trade, manufactures or ...”

“... Reactions​ by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to be his abandonment of America’s long-standing bipartisan support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict ...”

“... failing to ignite the electorate outside the cities. Tory losses were bigger than expected, and by the end of the day looked very bad indeed: the cumulative loss was 485 seats; before the election the Mail had warned that anything over four hundred should be seen as a ‘disaster’.The Tories’ loss was so obvious that ...”