“... He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be ...”

“... illustration. Guenther acknowledges the success of Nazi male chic – those ravishing, stiff black SS uniforms so romanticised in movies – but only to exclude men’s fashion from her account. She instead makes clear why there could be no Nazi chic for women. Since the 18th century, Jews had created and purveyed virtually all German elegance; and under ...”

“... of specimens and landscapes); and four servants from his Lincolnshire estate (two of them black). His luggage included a pair of greyhounds, a dog and a bitch called Lady (for hunting); a skiff (for netting marine specimens); a vast quantity of paper (for dried plants); glass cases, boxes and bottles; high-end optical instruments; fishing nets and ...”

“... became plain that summer, when it was instrumental in distributing participants’ coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests, one of the largest civil rights mobilisations in US history. A year later, it had a billion active users worldwide. Today, it is the fifth most popular social media platform, behind Instagram (with which it is catching up ...”

“... cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous ...”

“... of Woke, aka Anti Social Justice Warriors, or ‘Anti-SJW’, as they proclaim themselves on their black T-shirts, available online for £15. This switch-around isn’t entirely new. Thirty years ago, in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish wrote that ‘lately, many on the liberal and progressive left have been disconcerted to find that ...”

“... alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to ...”

“... American Andes played their melancholy flutes and on the pavements of New York, Paris and Rome black peddlers from West Africa sold trinkets to the natives as the natives’ ancestors had done on their trading voyages to the Dark Continent.’ Or when upper and middle-class youth start to take on the clothes, music and language of the urban poor. Strangely ...”

“... sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan in the metrically exuberant, sexually discreet translation of Benjamin Bickley Rogers. But the under-presence of the ancient freedom is everywhere, for those with ears to hear. The charge of not-quite-perfectly-concealed, intense homoerotic emotion in Housman’s scoutmasterish ‘love of comrades’ is a good example. It ...”

“... were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other things, they used to go about in the black-out attaching ‘sticky back’ notices to lamp-posts, telephone kiosks and so on. The notices informed passers-by that the war was a Jews’ war. Parties of illicit bill-stickers would emerge in pairs from Anna Wolkoff’s flat, all of them thoroughly au ...”

“... Prey do Beckmesser in an otherwise dreary Meistersinger at the Met. Rather than the neurotic, black-suited Shylock figure regularly trundled out, someone who barks more often than he sings, Prey’s Beckmesser was a pouty, vaguely adolescent, and extremely vulnerable middle-aged man, his insecure learning as a shield for his sexual uncertainties. But the ...”

“... made fixed festivals. But few other holidays entered the calendar to make up for the many red and black-letter days (major and minor feasts respectively) that had been stripped from the old year. The week, by contrast, dominated and ordered life. Calvin had rejected the idea that Christians were obliged to rest on the Sabbath. In New England, by ...”

“... room of the club, Stephen said, pointing with two fingers at a table across from us: ‘There’s Benjamin Britten.’ Against the light from the window, I saw a man with dense curly grey hair talking with someone at his table. Stephen kept looking toward him, but Britten never looked our way. As we were leaving the club, Stephen said, having, it ...”

“... and immaterialised – by its surroundings.) Once upon​ a time, in the good old days of Walter Benjamin, I thought of writing a book called Paul Cézanne, A Portrait Painter in the Era of High Positivism. Its question would have been: How do human beings offer themselves to ‘portrayal’ in a culture where they understand themselves, and expect others to ...”

“... of the USS Ranger. He had argued with senior officers in Boston, but in France found an ally in Benjamin Franklin, the American commissioner in Paris, and a womaniser unfazed by Jones’s own sexual profligacy. In April 1778, Jones sailed the Ranger from Brest, intending to harry British ships on the Atlantic coast. Two weeks later he seized and burned ...”