“... The generational divide is the one that still counts above all, but it appears in a very different light now compared with just a few weeks ago.What is society, then, to the likes of Whitty and Vallance, the men whom Johnson is said to be obeying so loyally? Ultimately it is a network, made up of billions of interconnected nodes. You can try to impose a nation ...”

“... on such subjects as Public Notices, Beards, Memory and Growing Old, the tone of voice – light, jokey, a touch valetudinarian – reminds one of an earlier small-former and radio star: Beerbohm. There is an ease of reference, and even the same touch of deliberate antiquarianism: Sparrow must be the last person in England still referring to the TES as ...”

“... extent still is in) over Mrs Henniker; he also manages to see her in a new and more prosaic light.’ There are indeed biographical elements in the text, but they have little to do with its power. The poet and the lady are satirised, but Hardy also endorses their spiritual affinity; they are doomed lovers who achieve an uncanny union through the shadows ...”

“... Lord Blyth) was chairman of Defence Sales until he left to join the Board of Plessey. Lt Gen Donald Isles had been director of weapons in the Ministry of Defence and was now a director of James’s own company, BMARC, as was Jonathan Aitken who had close links to the Saudi Royal Family, and Stefanus Adolphus Kock, a leading British intelligence agent and ...”

“... before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of the ...”

“... with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the Donald?) The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails! The Ethical Wreck! Our Straight-Talking-Thick-Ankled Lady of the Half-Explained! (Will Huma be there?) OMGoddess! It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire ...”

“... competitive tendering has effectively been suspended as departments have been given the green light to make ‘direct awards’ to firms; there is little, if any, accountability about the way these decisions are made. In late March, the Cabinet Office called in the accountants Deloitte to run a crisis unit to source PPE. The result was centralised ...”

“... scholars worry especially about his reputation in America and the UK. ‘For English readers,’ Donald Prater writes in his biography of Mann, ‘the humour of which he was so proud is faint.’ Prater is discussing the four Joseph novels (1933, 1934, 1936, 1943), but as far as I know English-speaking readers have not found Buddenbrooks (1901) or The Magic ...”

“... disciples, the genesis of symbolic forms is ‘the odyssey of the mind’. Fabien Capeillères and Donald Phillip Verene insist, however, that the odyssey of the mind can operate only by way of work. Is this a happy story, with a restored Odysseus projected towards hearth and home? In 1932, at the point of some very unenlightened developments in German ...”

“... sparser shelves of the geologists and philosophers. A little while ago an article in Nature, by Donald Hayes, set out to show that science journals are harder to read than they used to be. The test Hayes uses gives a numerical measure of ‘lexical difficulty’. It is crude, but probably pretty accurate. An analysis of the vocabulary of printed and spoken ...”

“... which the ‘ultimate aim’ is that the CE will be elected by ‘universal suffrage’, ‘in the light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong following a period of ‘gradual and orderly progress’. The same language is used about elections to the Legislative Council. In the annexes of the Basic Law concerning methods of election, the year 2007 is ...”

“... 2017 (a version appeared the year before in Freeman’s) and records events that took place before Donald Trump was elected president, and before the detention of children and families became a daily news story. There is a lot of continuity, however, not only in policy but in national sentiment. As Luiselli learns on her road trip, anti-immigrant ...”

“... even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a group of poets, Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Yang Lian, Mang Ke, Shu Ting and others, most ...”

“... home is a nuisance, a publicity plot, a cabal; and please don’t track the carpet. A letter to Donald Allen in September 1959 lists his influences, and those of his New York pals. These include Auden (‘though if Auden doesn’t drop the word numinous pretty soon, I shall squawk’), Pound, Eliot and Marianne Moore (but ‘after a bout of syllable ...”

“... his versions of it are handmade: easel works full of painterly tact. Reviewing the New York show, Donald Judd described the combination of elite means and commonplace ends as ‘having and eating your cake’.The pies and slices drew little local attention at their first outings in Sacramento and San Francisco galleries in 1961, but the New York show was a ...”