“... deaths that, in order for terror to have any effect, ever more sadistic methods of torture had to be dreamed up. In the mountains and hot valleys west of Bogotá, new styles of mutilation entered the argot: the ‘necktie cut’ involved pulling the victim’s tongue through a slit in the throat, while in the ‘florist’s cut’ severed limbs were arranged ...”

“... normally found in the more ponderous biographies of contemporary politicians. The standard life, by Conyers Read, is in two volumes (published in 1955 and 1960), each larger than Stephen Alford’s new book. Alford, the author of The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis (1998), has chosen to focus his study on the ...”

“... because, with oil prices low, an independent Scotland divorced from the English economy would be unable to sustain much in the way of a welfare state. Nevertheless, Britishness is shrivelling. Enoch-land repels. A hard Brexit will make the choices facing Scots more painful still. Do we cut ourselves off from European markets, or from our largest market ...”

“... the 20th century’. The pressure of this last question – or indeed of all three – is not to be collapsed into shorthand of the kind: ‘Wasn’t English landscape bound to be an exercise in nostalgia?’ or even: ‘How could a non-duplicitous celebration of the countryside possibly survive in a culture whose ...”

“... burst onto the scene with Fancy Free, a ballet about three sailors on shore leave; the score was by Leonard Bernstein and the two soon stormed Broadway with On the Town. The same year Martha Graham premiered a rich, visually spare piece called Appalachian Spring in collaboration with Aaron Copland and Isamu Noguchi. In 1945, John Cage and Merce Cunningham ...”

“... Alberto​ Giacometti (b.1901) had his first postwar show in France at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1951. From 1941 to 1945, he had been stranded in his native Switzerland, working on tiny sculptures that he brought back to Paris – so the story goes – in matchboxes. He had started scaling up since then, creating the austere works in plaster and bronze for which he’s now remembered ...”

“... put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be heard’, and the quarrel between those who took to theory and those who took against it was just starting up. John had no doubts about which side he was on – I’m not sure he ever had doubts: he had questions – and the argument for theory was all the ...”

“... Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to Constantinople in 1506. Sultan Bayezid II had already commissioned a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn from Leonardo da Vinci, and rejected it. Now Michelangelo, far from immune to rivalrous feelings, was being offered the chance to ...”

“... reign of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a murder. However, far from being the novel’s hero, the Namier figure is, in accordance with the reputation of his original, a crashing bore, dominating the breakfast table with the minutiae of his ...”

“... All day​ it has rained,’ goes a poem written by Alun Lewis in 1941, while he was stationed with the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, ready for war but not yet called to action. It’s a poem about being bored and being grateful for the boredom since worse is to come. ‘We talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome ...”

“... it after the UN intervened. Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s chief of the general staff, happened to be in the settlement for a wedding and asked to give the eulogy at Rotberg’s funeral the following evening. Speaking of the men who killed Rotberg he asked: ‘Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and ...”

“... evil spirits and magical objects. The world we take for granted, the show suggested, might not be the one in which we live. Like the series from which it takes its name, Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, first published in Spanish in 2016, is closer to an anthology than a traditional novel, only here the encounters aren’t with aliens or amulets but ...”

“... Bridge. This put an end to the steady progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland ...”

“... My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian ...”

“... hard-right War Room webcast. ‘Look, I’m a progressive Democrat,’ Wolf said. ‘I would be delighted to be talking to CNN and MSNBC and publishing in the New York Times like I used to, but those are not the platforms that are calling me, they aren’t the ones who want to talk about rights and freedoms.’ ‘How ...”