“... used several times, a magnificent woman’s face, carved and painted by the outsider artist S.L. Jones: The Museum of Everything But I would be loath to put an image forward as one of ‘mine’ in which the head was the main element and went unchanged. And yet when I feel I have disguised the head enough – made it so only I could possibly pick out ...”

“... with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was ...”

“... man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end of the Second World War was before my ...”

“...  Listen to Emily Wilson discuss Aristophanes with Thomas Jones on Among the Ancients, part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Find out more here.When​ Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure ...”

“... to prosecute people who injected at an SDCF. Frustrated by the situation, an activist called Peter Krykant set up an unsanctioned drugs consumption van on a Glasgow street in 2020, and in September 2023, the new lord advocate, Dorothy Bain, agreed to waive prosecutions for a three-year pilot run by the Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership – what ...”

“... designs, such as the abortive plan for London County Hall in 1907, borrowed from Wren and Inigo Jones, without paying any interest. Others, like the Rand Regiments’ Memorial in Johannesburg of 1911, dished up Edwardian Baroque at its most pompous and flatulent. Moreover, in this premier league, the referee could be stern and the spectators ...”

“... beautiful cover illustration for The Wise Wound, the study of menstruation by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (translated into German in 1980), shows the Grail chalice within a womb. In Syberberg’s film Amfortas’s wound is both internal and external, as in dream-logic: his tunic is bloodied at groin-level, but the wound is also carried about on a ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... Charles Vaughan, chief of staff of Thiel Capital, owned by the billionaire former Trump supporter Peter Thiel, and Jordan Peterson, who was invited by Orr and other academics to be a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity in 2019. After a photo emerged of Peterson with a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I’m a proud ...”

“... his writing. Zuckerman first appeared in My Life as a Man, but as the creation of another writer, Peter Tarnopol, rather than Roth. This is really a new start for him. Zuckerman is at a crossroads, having written stories based on his New Jersey Jewish background that have caused offence within the family. (There are many points of correspondence between ...”

“... difference between his way of talking and the circus of manipulation surrounding us. Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, was led into a conference room with his producer, Priya Patel, and Mark Ward, a technology correspondent for the BBC News website. Wright sat at his laptop, hardly looking up, and a screen on the wall showed what he ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... was his bag (in high art they call it ‘selective quotation’ or ‘homage’). Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged ...”

“... of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ...”

“... In looks, this Odyssey is often reminiscent of other 21st-century screen ‘epics’, not least Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The visit to the Land of the Dead reminded me of the excursions beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones. At the end of the film, which draws heavily on Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond ...”