“... Grant only persevered with their abstract arrangements for two years or so, before reverting to more Fauvist and figurative work. Abstraction never took hold in England, either in Bloomsbury or in the Vortex. Butler, I think, is inclined to exaggerate the differences between the two, both of whom briefly and almost simultaneously experimented with ...”

“... with long chapters about the two grandfathers. Bertie (pronounced ‘Bartie’) Mitford and Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent manner, never as lobby-fodder. Neither ...”

“... is an unusually extreme statement for an expatriate Irish writer to make, and one result of the more moderate and ambivalent contemporary attitude is that critics nowadays believe that Irish writers have always been similarly moderate. Thus the influence of the Fenians on Wilde, Yeats and Joyce has been overlooked or minimised, and their work has been ...”

“... of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he carried about with him, as his most cherished possession, the photograph of a woman he identified as his mother. This led Ashley Montagu to speculate that, unlike Alexander ...”

“... appropriately reverberant thunderclap, the long epoch of therapeutic nihilism described by Lewis Thomas in his most recent book.* The insulin story begins, of course, as other medical stories begin, at the bedside – with the taking of a history and an appraisal of the patient’s general health. The history would be loss of weight, debility and general ...”

“... down a wing of our local Catholic secondary school. It’s not that any of us were evil; even the more bookish and shy among us were given to a bit of destructive boredom and stupid imagining. Now and then it got out of hand. The boys I hung around with in my pre-teen years were always losing the head. During the good weather, the light nights, what started ...”

“... a name’ – and I suspect the one that brought the tears, climaxes the second stanza and is more or less borrowed from Falstaff and Shakespeare (‘What’s in this word honour?’). Kipling often insists on the panic and emptiness the troops far from home felt in battle, but it is Newbolt who understates that knowledge most effectively. No wonder ...”

“... could provoke disastrous swings in the exchange rate unless the local currency was pegged to a more stable counterpart such as the French franc, especially in the age of Bretton Woods. Marchés coloniaux also reasoned that the colonies didn’t qualify for monetary autonomy because they lacked bullion. But they only lacked bullion because the colonial ...”

“... richest 62 persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people.’ The disparity is stupefying; it would be hardly less stupefying if Scheidel were off by a factor of, say, two or three, and 124 or 186 individuals had as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. That the rich ...”

“... As Martines shows, churches were by no means off-limits as locations for murder: the slaying of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral might have passed almost without notice in Italy. Indeed, the Pazzi chose as their signal to act the moment when Cardinal Riario elevated the Host: that is, the precise instant when, according to the Catholic faith that ...”

“... of getting students to read mass-market bestsellers.) Why are there no great novelists any more, critics often wail, as they hark back to a golden age of exquisite sentences and profound moral depths. There are no great novelists any more for the same reason there are no longer any sugar plantations in the ...”

“... other historians, sociologists and philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour’s work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something ...”

“... of dollars to conservatives who support Donald Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud in 2020. Thomas Klingenstein, a NatCon regular, gave $100,000; he is chair of the Claremont Institute, the Californian think tank known as ‘the nerve centre of the American right’. Britain does not have the same culture of political funding as the US, but its ...”

“... happened: she got a bigger office, and share options. She was no longer allowed to travel with more than a few other senior employees, to minimise the loss to the company if the plane went down. And among her new responsibilities, she was ‘invited’ to have ‘voluntary contributions’ deducted from her salary: payments to the company’s political ...”

“... a fire broke out in the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, a wretched, segregated prison where more than 4000 men were packed into a facility built to hold 1500. By the time it was extinguished, 322 prisoners lay dead, and the National Guard was called in to suppress rioting. Among the survivors was Chester Himes, a twenty-year-old black man serving a ...”