“... between the cotton-pickin’ southern slave states and the northern Yankee country, in which a black man might be free.In form, and in content also, Mason & Dixon is, on a Which?-guide level, many things rolled into one. It’s an epic in ways both obvious and not-so-obvious like the Odyssey, and it’s a simple-hearted buddy story, too. It’s a burlesque ...”

“... But no one doubts that, a pocket still to be mopped up behind borders that already extend to the Black Sea, they will enter it in due course. The great issue facing the Union lies further east, at the point where no vast steppe confounds the eye, but a long tradition has held that a narrow strip of water separates one world from another. No one has ever ...”

“... it was possible on 11 January 2015 for François Hollande, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Benjamin Netanyahu and three dozen world leaders to assemble shoulder to shoulder at the place de la République, to march twenty abreast with arms interlinked and to chant with the crowd of a million: ‘Je suis Charlie.’A sequel in a lower strain occurred ...”

“... increased access to contraception and family planning. These strategies almost always involve black and brown women in developing countries having fewer babies. There is, of course, an unmet need for reproductive care and birth control in these countries, but we should be deeply sceptical of climate solutions that place the burden of solving the problem ...”

“... at Tannenberg, for example, or the Cossacks dealing with a demonstration, or perhaps the Black Hundreds falling to work in a shtetl – the formative effect would have or might have been different. Yet I think it’s clear, from his own recurrence to the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the ...”

“... Granada’. It then moves to 1348 and the massacre of Jews as agents of a conspiracy spreading the Black Death, which unfolded further east towards the Alps. In each case, confessions of a phantasmagoric iniquity were extorted, under pressure of torture. By 1380 the Inquisition was ferreting out Waldensian heretics on the southern flank of the Alps. Soon ...”

“... in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one afternoon as the New York sun began to dip. One of the reasons the resulting image was ...”

“... Ghost, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld – a literature of paranoia offering its own kind of black-magical realism. In Europe, on the other hand, it has been, not the CIA, but the Third Reich and the Judeocide that have polarised historical imagination: Grass, Tournier, Sebald. England, relatively untouched by the Second World War, has generated instead ...”

“... quirkiest testimony to its renown comes in The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett’s play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, when two of the wrinkles come alive and engage in a brief dialogue about themselves. As its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of ...”

“... How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and ...”

“... an illustrator. Among the friends he made there was Tommy Jackson, a young artist who studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Jackson sent him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray ...”

“... between positive and negative freedom in Four Essays on Liberty derives, of course, above all from Benjamin Constant’s lecture under the Restoration comparing Ancient and Modern Liberty. But where Constant sought to ground the difference between the two in a comparative sociology of the Classical and contemporary worlds, Berlin treats them largely as ...”

“... made her calculation about Jerusalem. For evidence of the continuity of Jewish life in Palestine, Benjamin of Tudela is quoted to show that ‘whole [Jewish] “village communities of Galilee survived” the Crusaders, but his discovery that there were only 1,440 Jews in all of Palestine is not mentioned. The Reverend James Parkes is cited many times, but his ...”

“... the hoof, however, everything begins to ease up and move with him, in the manner of the city that Benjamin envisaged for Baudelaire. Rimbaud was not a flâneur. There’s too much of the forced march, and the habits of the robust boy from the sticks, in the way he gets from A to B. But in the Illuminations, the effects of parallax and the sense of landscape ...”