“... in County Mayo is close to where Joyce’s father was born. ‘In the town,’ he writes, there is a factory that ‘produces the entire world’s production of Botox … This is a world beyond the imagination of the parents and grandparents of those who work there, and one scarcely credible to me.’The actual world of the ...”

“... On the evening of 11 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Washington about black suffrage. The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand ...”

“... I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian and Turkish rugs, mirrors with gilded and curly frames; brass trays ...”

“... 10 January. Listen to a tape Ariel Crittall has made about her life at the request of the Imperial War Museum. She remembers meeting Unity and Diana Mitford off the train in Munich on the morning of the Night of the Long Knives and Diana saying: ‘What bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’ Ariel’s language is a joy ...”

“... relations reached their lowest point was probably 29 May 1794 – 10 Prairial, Year II, as the French then styled it. On that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English ...”

“... over thirty years since the angry drumbeat of Howl first assembled the dissatisfied tribes of an expanding American subculture, and gave them a name and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October ...”

“... Who began​ the killing? At root, arguments about the genesis of the Troubles are arguments about responsibility for murder, and that’s one reason it has proved so hard to disentangle history from blame in accounts of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the killing in the North ...”

“... clear if anything dangerous was done, but the US media were showcasing their heavy artillery with a leak of their own, which had to have come from the White House staff or intelligence agents on the scene. Mostly, however, the article seemed to be an excuse to deploy the expression ‘Putin Butts In’ – ...”

“... At​ Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral – which started fifteen minutes late, in deference to her own habitual lateness – Colin Farrell recited ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the last two years of her life, when he was in his thirties and she was in her late seventies, Farrell had become one of Taylor’s closest friends ...”

“... A recent episode in a jobbing writer’s life found me interviewing Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg) in her comprehensively occupied Belsize Park flat. The unreality of this situation – talking, shoulder to shoulder, with one of the Beat Generation’s best-preserved icons – was ameliorated by the fact that our paths had crossed a number of times over the last fifteen years ...”

“... In December​ 2019, the US space force was established as the sixth branch of the US armed forces. Though founded by the Trump administration, the space force was not a Trump invention. Its precursor, air force space command, was set up in 1982. In 2001, a commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld concluded that it was being neglected, and recommended setting up a separate ‘military department for space’, something that has remained a goal of American generals ever since ...”

“... the BBC’s purpose, its licence fee income of £3.8 billion is either too much or not enough. In a world dominated by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google, it’s ever harder for the BBC to keep up. It is estimated that Netflix alone will have spent upwards of $12 billion on content in 2018. It has a global audience ...”

“... duties were first applied by medieval sheikhs and sultans in some of the places he has designated as ‘shithole countries’. They were not really things of beauty either, being modest tolls to raise a little revenue, not intended to keep out foreign stuff, and were seldom charged ...”

“... 2 January. Catching up on the literary round-ups at the year’s end I’m struck as so often by how cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally. I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do ...”

“... you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism. How one feels about Rorty’s eloquent, deliberate and subtle brashness depends on one’s education and sensibility, on ...”