“... air in Philadelphia’, ‘a very sick, decadent, decaying, fear-ridden place’, which had made a strong impression on him as an art student. He remembered its factories and the ‘smiling bags of death’ in the morgue across the road. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry, an awkward, anxious man with a six-inch pompadour the shape of a mushroom cloud. He ...”

“... my nieces and nephews. From his first story, ‘The Rockpile’, in which the brothers John and Roy appear, to Go Tell It on the Mountain, from the story ‘Sonny’s Blues’ to Tell Me how Long the Train’s Been Gone, the love between brothers in Baldwin is elemental, like Greek tragedy in its sense of foreboding. In ‘Sonny’s Blues’, one brother is ...”

“... fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else. The first volume of Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, taking us up to 1914, which was published in 1997 (the second and final volume will be published in the autumn), showed that while no statement or public position by Yeats could be taken at face value, this did not mean that he ...”

“... species; inherent human destructiveness only awaited technological progress to be realised. Roy Scranton, in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), is less deterministic than Kolbert’s Faustian scientist but no less gloomy. Whether or not humanity might once have elected a different course, by now it’s too late: ‘The greatest challenge we ...”

“... Jews and novo [sic] riche’ she encountered in Madeira on her honeymoon – gave way to a strong admiration for her Jewish constituents, among whom she found many of the values she herself cherished. ‘My, they were good citizens,’ she later remarked, seeing Jews as ‘natural traders’ who managed ‘positively to get on by their own ...”

“... drew on British, American and White Dominion precedents for an original synthesis, combining a strong central executive with a symbolic presidency, a bicameral legislature with reserved seats for minorities, a Supreme Court with robust provincial governments, in a semi-federal structure denominated a union. Widely admired at the time and since, and not ...”

“... He listed five kinds of permissible trap door. A trap door in category B ‘should be strong enough to carry the weight of a man who accidentally steps on the trap door. It must carry a label on self-adhesive vinyl, black on yellow, measuring 250 by 200 mm, saying DO NOT STAND ON THIS TRAP DOOR.’ Who was this far-off bureaucrat? Did a superior ...”

“... But although at least forty Conservative MPs were against joining the EEC, 69 Labour MPs led by Roy Jenkins were in favour. There was thus never any real risk of the government being defeated on the issue. When the decisive third reading of the European Communities Bill came in July 1972, it passed by 301 to 284 votes. Britain had finally made it into ...”

“... The authority of the Court of Appeal is in ruins. In the same reports I read the admissions of Roy Amlot, who appeared for the Crown in the appeal. Material discovered in police files, Amlot told the court, threw ‘such a doubt now upon the honesty and integrity’ of the investigating officers that ‘it would not be right for the Crown to contend that ...”

“... another 3075 had carried five or fewer. Three years later, the writer and shipping consultant Roy Pedersen, one of CalMac’s sternest critics, estimated that the ferry to the Small Isles (Rum, Eigg, Canna and Muck, whose population at the 2011 census totalled 153) cost £26,000 a year for every man, woman and child who lived there. CalMac could respond ...”