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“... is to blame? Much of the press coverage has focused on the staffing crisis that emerged in the first year of the pandemic. More and more officers began to call in sick, or else requested restrictive-duty assignments that prevent them from working with people in custody. At one point, some two thousand guards (around a third of the daily workforce) were ...”

“... undertow slowly reveals itself. You’ll know it now, but probably you missed it, as I did, the first time, as you missed the heavy winter suit Joe was wearing when he dropped in at the house of the woman next door. The sugar mice, the cherry print on Nina’s new bikini. The ball of hair in the Andalusian almond soup. The impact on everybody of Isabel’s ...”

“... would establish themselves in due course. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798) had argued that human populations carry on growing until their needs exceed the supply of sustenance; and when Darwin read it in 1838 he extended the principle to all forms of life, suggesting that ‘the supply of food’ provides an ...”

“... it was also home to Austria’s easternmost fortress. Barely a month after the beginning of the First World War, that fortress fell to the Russian army, marking the start of decades of struggle to control (and rename) the city. It shifted back and forth between Austria and Russia during the Great War: ‘Lemberg ist noch in unserem Besitz’ (‘Lemberg is ...”

“... So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure ...”

“... reproaches is embarrassing. She is a wonderfully clear-sighted writer, innately courteous, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or E.M. Forster, to the creatures of her imagination. It is foolhardy of her, though, to take on Kafka, whose work remains a set text for any examination on the 20th century. Both Robert Plunket and Dirk Bogarde tell tall tales from Los ...”

“... On 26 September, he nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat on the court vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and pushed her to be confirmed quickly by the Republican majority in the Senate. The next day brought an engrossing and carefully documented New York Times story by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire detailing Trump’s ...”

“... pantheon. She has won prestigious awards by the armful: she was recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have ...”

“... arise when the person he calls ‘the party’ – as in Groucho Marx’s ‘party of the first part’ – manages to surprise in the middle of the night an official who is not the one assigned to his case but nevertheless has some competence in the matter. K is already half-asleep, but able to hear most of this. ‘You think this can never ...”

“... from off-the-record interviews with many of the dramatis personae in Theresa May’s topsy-turvy first year as prime minister. There is much here that leaves the reader uneasy – including a portent of our stodgy post-Brexit future, the potatoes served with lasagne at a Chequers lunch. Those who follow politics are used to reading about its adrenalin-driven ...”

“... where he had been a professor since 1897, he trained a generation of anthropologists; after the First World War he also taught at Barnard, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia. And although he was himself certainly a public figure – he once appeared on the cover of Time – it was his Barnard students who became truly ubiquitous in American ...”

“... years later, she realised ‘with dismay that I wasn’t like it any longer’: ‘It was the first time I was aware of time, change and the longing for the past. I was nine years of age.’ The memory of the dress – ‘over and over I would remember that magic dress’ – worn for the first time with a frangipani ...”

“... meaning and became something that a woman would rather not be called. In the instructions for the first Schools Broadcast I wrote, in the days of crackling wireless sets in stuffy village schools, the producer called her ‘splendid’. Because of the crackle, we weren’t allowed sound-effects, certainly not the ‘thunder of the foaming, flying Ogowé ...”

“... magazine: ‘I believe very strongly in fascism,’ he said. ‘Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.’ In August, Eric Clapton took a break from a performance in Birmingham to demand the repatriation of Britain’s immigrant and black population. ‘You should all just leave,’ he said to members of his audience. ‘Not just leave the ...”

“... and the poems, too, can be read as something like works of criticism. Many critics see ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ as the earliest evidence of Keats’s genius, and the sonnet treats with Renaissance magnificence that peculiarly modern subject, the poet as reader of poetry. Or again, the remarkable fragment which, only two and a half ...”