“... many of them left-leaning intellectuals, and the story of their ‘duping’ is familiar from Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981). David-Fox makes it a more complicated and more interesting story, with the West seen bamboozling the Kremlin while the Kremlin bamboozles gullible Westerners; the Soviet side is no longer a monolith but includes a ...”

“... Her blessed declensions: I may, I can, I will and I shall; and you shall see for yourself. The corner we occupy in devotion is small, very small. ‘It seemed to me that this little thing that is made might have disintegrated into nothing because of its smallness.’ But the hazelnut that Julian of Norwich saw ‘lasts, and always will, because God loves ...”

“... make sure no one remained, and was now being pulled up. I spoke to one of the other people there, Paul Verryn, a Methodist bishop whose church was raided by police in 2008 after he opened it to Zimbabwean refugees. He told me he had come to offer counselling to anyone who needed it. He had been here during some of the Khuma rescues, he added, and seen the ...”

“... AI open source again’ and necklaces that read ‘own your data’; one man had a Ron Paul 2008 sweatshirt. Everyone was trying to find the actual DOGE engineers in the crowd of young men. ‘I’m sick of Elon,’ a political consultant told me. ‘He’s not funny. After he’s done doing all of this, he better give a billion dollars to the ...”

“... beginning in 1979 with the dramatic increase of interest rates under the Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker and continuing with Reagan’s tax reforms, which together brought about an enormous wealth transfer to high earners and the already well-off. Eight years earlier, Nixon had removed the dollar from the gold standard, which meant that the state had ...”

“... hourly wage or Medicaid. He was an independent agent. His windfall was always just around the corner, with the right crypto investment, the right sports bet, the right meme stock. It was the sweepstake election, with Elon Musk handing a giant cardboard cheque for a million dollars to a real estate agent called Jason who homeschools his six children in ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... touched with a characteristic Hrabalian oddity: ‘In the little pub overhanging the river, in a corner by the window, I was reading. You were weeping, I too was weeping and the tubby landlady was weeping.’ In the early 1950s, he was a member of an underground literary group run by the poet Jiri Kolar. His poems had now become stories, but he did not ...”

“... swimsuits, cocktails and jazz – at times Scott Fitzgerald is staying at the hotel down the road. Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s canny, conservative dealer, backs up the big spending, encouraging him to trot out easy-on-the-eye charmers to keep Olga in Chanel couture. Not long after the return to Paris, however, the need arises to bring another literary ...”

“... of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and tabloid sleaze that festered in a corner of New York City, a vindication of his mentor, the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, a figure unknown to the vast majority of enthusiasts who jammed Trump’s rallies and hailed him as the authentic voice of the people.The notion of a Trump literature ...”

“... Executive with David Austin (who would become a lifelong collaborator) and Ridgeley’s brother Paul. Michael was lead vocalist but hadn’t yet found the right style: his attempts at a Jamaican accent fell flat. A fifth member, Andrew Leaver, directed homophobic slurs at James Sullivan, a gay American student friend in whom Michael had confided his ...”

“... Kaminskys might have been among them, had it not been for the efforts of Adolfo’s older brother, Paul, who successfully petitioned the Argentine consul in Paris. In January 1944, they were released. ‘Why us, and why not them?’ Adolfo wondered. In Paris, he bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But ...”

“... Patience, with hands clasped, looks down on the huddled, robed figure of Grief, shrinking into the corner of the composition. Kauffman’s classical histories, though typically more orthodox in their subject matter, foregrounded male deeds and exchanges but drew the eye elsewhere. Her Hector Upbraiding Paris for His Retreat from Battle (1770) shows the two ...”

“... Church as it would have seemed to contemporaries, who did not know that civil war lay round the corner. Collinson has done for early 17th-century religion what Conrad Russell has done for early 17th-century politics. He leaves the Church in the late 1620s where Russell has left Parliament – a very long way from revolution. The Jacobean Church was a broad ...”

“... to learn – and surprised by my ignorance – that the apostle had been buried in this far-flung corner of Tamil Nadu. The cathedral of San Thome, rebuilt in 1893, is a large neo-Gothic structure in wedding-cake white not far from the southern end of Chennai’s Marine Beach. I saw his tomb in the crypt beneath it, and the displayed sliver of his bone, and ...”