“... small sofa in the Mount Vernon Room at the Westbury, a few feet from a pool of vomit, left behind by a woman accompanying the Australian Ashes team – when so many enthusiasts waited over half a century to set eyes on a stamp which they must have begun to doubt ever existed. The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New ...”

“... English in the American academy. If anyone qualifies as an expert on academic instincts, it must be Marjorie Garber. She has been aptly described by the New York Times as ‘one of the most powerful women in the academic world’, and in Prospect as ‘the reigning queen of cultural studies’. In a career that spans ...”

“... law school’ our young lawyers are taught that civil liberties in this country are ‘protected by the common law’ and that ‘their violation has been the fault of Parliament’. The hero of the story, law students learn, is an ‘independent judiciary’, standing steadfastly between the citizenry and tyrannical politicians. Apparently it performed this ...”

“... language is a site of migrating meanings, shifts of sense, appropriations of voice, the ‘I’ by turns supremely assertive against language and crowded out by it. It also contains moments of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging ...”

“... Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, and now would-be novelist. Some in the Conservative Party were worried that her book, Scandal, with its lurid yellow cover featuring a high-heeled woman treading on another’s toes and its delicious promise of a ‘sexy, scandalous and utterly authentic exposé of the world ...”

“... year. Success of a sort followed. Hopper’s painting of a tall, old-fashioned house, cut off by the modern encroachment of a railroad track, was the first painting acquired by the new Museum of Modern Art, and he had his first retrospective there three years later, in 1933. His watercolours and canvases were snapped up ...”

“... I never heard of such a thing before,’ and received the reply: ‘Haven’t you? Oh, it is by no means uncommon.’ Barrett Browning noted, also, that ‘Miss Cushman has an unimpeachable character.’ Cushman not only had a public partnership with Hays and, after her, with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, but a long secret affair with a young woman who ...”

“... sick, and Gloriana and her mommy are going to have to go away for a while, so Gloriana won’t be coming over to play.’ Gloriana’s daddy sure did get sick. Albert Anastasia, head of Murder Incorporated and capo of the Mangano family, had been assassinated that morning at 10.20 while getting a shave at the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue. The ...”

“... In the United States, ‘English’ can mean ‘spin’: a deliberate turn put on a ball by striking it so that it swerves. It’s a subtle epithet, perhaps recording a canny colonial take on the larger distortions inseparable from imperial rule. But the truth is that as the English invented ‘Great Britain’ and then began the process of large-scale colonisation, they put quite a lot of English on ‘Englishness’ itself ...”

“... could look down through your bent legs and see what really lay between them. It was considered to be an essential encounter with the centre of your being. Consciousness-raising began, as it always must, by peering into the heart of darkness. At the time it was clear that there was no chance of getting in touch with your ...”

“... he died. All had been lifted from Fincham’s ‘twopenny library’ on Colchester’s North Hill by my grandmother. Her modus operandi was simple. A regular and trusted customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want ...”

“... reject the delusions of Reaganomics, Thatcherism, Blairism and the World Bank? If Blackburn is to be believed, pensions are the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. Despite the subtitle of his book, Blackburn is concerned more with the current crisis and its resolution than with the long history of pensions. He identifies two pension traditions, the ...”

“... Telegraph. ‘Something bad [was said] on the field: “You’re a black cunt.” Then another ran by and said: “It’s the truth, you’re nothing but that.”’ He said that he would not play again unless he received an apology and was convinced that the Gaelic Athletic Association was serious about stamping out sectarianism. Few people outside his own ...”

“... 2022 Rwanda did not accept a single asylum claim from nationals of Yemen, Afghanistan or Syria. By contrast, the UK accepted 40 per cent of asylum claims by Yemenis, 74 per cent by Afghans and 98 per cent by Syrians. Other evidence showed that asylum ...”

“... Aged 17, he had proved a new result in modal logic – the logic of necessity and possibility – by building a mathematical model of ‘possible worlds’. He went on to transform philosophy, reviving dormant metaphysical questions. What makes us the particular people we are? Does science tell us how the world must be, not ...”