“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... were never given in the first place. One man suffered an aneurysm which he believes was brought on by the stress the situation caused him, only to be presented with a bill for £5000 for his NHS treatment – again because his paperwork didn’t measure up – while also losing his job and his home. He was left on the ...”

“... Guard were duly deployed in their thousands along the frontier, and migrants were travelling by boat up the Pacific coast to avoid them. I had just arrived in the town of Tapachula in the southern state of Chiapas, not far from the Guatemalan border, when I heard that a boat had capsized. On the morning of 11 October, a fisherman had spotted clothing ...”

“... union is in trouble. But this time the problem needs a new question. Forget: ‘Should Scotland be independent?’ The Scots will take care of that. Ask instead: ‘Who in the rest of Britain needs this union with Scotland? And why?’ Through the long Covid months, it was only England that Boris spoke for, and spoke to, at those teatime briefings from ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... of someone forced into sex work reflects their true self, or whether self-narration might also be self-deception, are questions that seemingly don’t trouble this line of argument. What if someone tells contradictory stories about themselves? How do you decide which tales are true? You can’t resort to standards of evidence, coherence, plausibility and ...”

“... When the Roman emperor Vitellius was deserted in his last moments by everyone except his cook, the aristocratic historian Tacitus could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms ...”

“... parting gift: strategies for pleasuring women. (‘He said he didn’t know if they’d be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself, but it was all he had in the way of a dowry.’) In ‘Majesty’, a woman fantasises about fucking Prince William. (‘Gradually I realised he had lifted up the back of my skirt and was nuzzling his face ...”

“... romantic swimming as balm and symbol of the death-wish, and public school swimming as it might be called – a bracing and brutal baptism to banish mollycoddling and drive morbid fancies out of youthful heads.Swinburne managed to combine both attitudes, getting a masochistic pleasure out of being flogged by rough rocks ...”

“... At the corner of Marsham Street and Horseferry Road stands the new Home Office building, designed by Terry Farrell and Partners. It was opened in 2005 and everything still looks just as it should. Along the Marsham Street frontage big plinths present crisp rectangles of grass and brimming water, orderly packages of the organic ...”

“... Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s subject. To find out how Western concerns and speculations were projected by the distorting lens of (often wishful) ignorance, she has trawled a substantial range of material – from the sparse documentary accounts of travellers to any number of imaginative genres, both literary and visual. Just what significance she expected this ...”

“... will put under the microscope the events of Friday, 2 April 1982. The full truth may never be revealed. Who telephoned whom, to say what? The apparent ephemeralities of that morning may never be identified. What is certain is that within minutes of the news of the Argentinian military aggression in the Falklands ...”

“... place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence in Azerbaijan, thanks mainly to BP, the country’s biggest foreign investor. In September 2023, senior BP executives travelled to Baku for the centenary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer who bequeathed the presidency to his son, Ilham, when ...”

“... bring resolution. Instead, the hospital is a place of bureaucracy and confusion, where you might be kept alive but left in debt, the course of treatment is decided by unseen administrators, and a few acts of negligence can kill you. Small Rain begins with pain. It’s the summer of 2020, in Iowa City, and one Saturday the ...”

“... Tübingen’s professor of Greek, Martin Kraus, known to posterity as Martin Crusius, could, by his own admission, ‘rightly be said to be drunk with love for Greek affairs’. To him each new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their ...”