“... from them.’ The solution God came up with was the ‘confusion of tongues’, ‘that they may not understand one another’s speech’. One tower-builder would now say, ‘Bitte geben Sie mir einen kleineren Schraubenschlüssel,’ and another would reply: ‘Non ho idea di quello che stai chiedendo.’ Exasperated, a third would ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... religious reawakening, sold well and was made into a sentimental movie starring Judy Holliday and Richard Conte. Backed by a reasonably lavish promotional campaign (‘In a CHANGING world, this motion picture is joyously dedicated to the heartwarming fact that BABIES still come in the same old, wonderfully old-fashioned way!’), the film was profitable and ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... it up, even in the North-West. And while Lennon had his self-indulgent and self-pitying side, and may well have said, ‘I like to write about me’ (as opposed to the outgoing McCartney), we are after all talking about the man who wrote ‘Revolution’, ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’. If his desire to steer an even course between contradictory ...”

“... the inappropriate alchemical term – by modestly noting: ‘The English equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.’ (The Hebrew had merely put together two words that both mean ‘honey’.) St Hilary said that the Book of Psalms is a ...”

“... truth of Johnson’s remark that ‘a woman has such power between the ages of 20 and 45 that she may tie a man to a post and whip him if she will.’ McIntyre handles with his usual tact the question of Johnson’s masochism (on which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend ...”

“... affected those attitudes. Next he mines the questionnaires gathered by researchers working with Richard Brown on Tyneside in the late 1960s to see how rapid cultural change and class conflict were experienced by shipyard workers, before turning to Ray Pahl’s decade-long study of the Isle of Sheppey to gauge the impact of deindustrialisation, unemployment ...”

“... press and an independent judiciary); by 1992, it was 35 per cent. He began his piece by quoting Richard Holbrooke on the previous year’s Bosnian elections: what if free and fair elections put in power ‘racists, fascists and separatists’? In The Light That Failed (2019), Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the rise of illiberalism in Eastern ...”

“... struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... its wheat and wheat flour’, despite having only 3 per cent of the world’s population. Malthus may well have helped build the infrastructure of this empire, but he would have been horrified by the way it enabled Britain to live beyond its means and to ignore a natural law designed to stimulate not gluttony, but self-reliance and restraint.Neo-Malthusians ...”

“... height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled by the spin or put off by the fact that you may already have a dozen books on the Cold War on your shelves. Both Radchenko’s and Vladislav Zubok’s new books are ones you want to read. They make comprehensible a Russian perspective on a key question of 20th-century history that we generally see only ...”

“... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...”