“... because when he got up – climbing the ladder one-handed – they’d all disappeared. The next day, a policeman phoned to ask Smith why he’d done that. ‘I said, I didn’t have a choice. I asked him if it had been live, and he said, “You don’t want to know,” so I presume it was.’ Mostly, though, other than sewage or toilet paper the sewers ...”

“... which looked messy but functioned well, in favour of pointless greensward where ‘Christopher Robin might go hippety-hoppety.’ It destroyed human networks and replaced them with emptiness and formality. Jacobs’s alternative wasn’t a new proposal but something, she claimed, that already existed, and needed only to be helped along: the ‘ballet of ...”

“... death.Longley’s achievement was not the product of anything like self-assurance. ‘Almost every day, like needing Vitamin C,’ Edna Longley wrote of her late husband, ‘Michael would ask: “Am I a good poet?” And I would reassure him, perhaps adding: “and a great poet”.’ That Longley repeatedly sought confirmation suggests something fruitfully ...”

“... you could almost drink/To know how jewels taste’. She has sometimes been read as a latter-day Christina Rossetti, but attempts to place her in this lineage are a little strained, and in her poetry the word ‘heaven’ always arrives with a sense of let-down. The only thing Mew wants to be everlasting is transience; angels envy mortals rather than the ...”

“... demands right-wing concessions, especially as they pertain to refugees.Thanks to the journalist Robin Alexander’s Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (as yet untranslated, but something like ‘The Impelled: Merkel and Refugee Politics’), we now have a fine-grained account of Merkel’s decision to open the border in September ...”

“... in contrast, provided exactly what was sentimentally required by the audience. In the England of Robin Hood and Coeur de Lion, commoner and King find themselves united in manly accord, if ever they can, with the help of a disguise kit, elude the net of intervening ceremony (traditionally the King is ‘a regular guy’ though his courtly advisers are ...”

“... music which is ‘perhaps, the misunderstood utterance of prayer’. It is erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ...”

“... he failed to answer questions about the location of either al-Zawahiri (despite having met him the day before his capture) or bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the man who led the Americans to Abbotabad. Other detainees told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti had been well known to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for years. So the waterboarding not only fed ...”

“... don’t marry their sisters, and mothers don’t cut their babies’ throats. Six years ago, when Robin Robertson translated Euripides’ Medea, he added an epigraph from a poem of Brecht’s: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes there will also be singing About the dark times. Perhaps the singing of dark times is popular now because tragedies ...”

“... they care for as the fox doth for the geese ... insomuch as they permit and suffer you to read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus ... ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think.’ The positions of Tyndale and More were, it has often been pointed out, both poles apart and remarkably close. On social matters, they were often in ...”

“... when she was still very young, though already a wife and mother. It has been well translated by Robin Kemball. Tsvetaeva’s background was as much European as Russian. Her father was a distinguished and absent-minded professor (‘my attentively uncomprehending father’) who came from a family of Orthodox priests: but her mother, his second wife, was from ...”

“... food. City life was happening everywhere ... Flies get dizzy spells and bees have booze problems. Robin redbreasts hit the deck with psychosomatic ulcers and cholesterol overload. In the alleys, dogs are coughing their hearts out on snout and dope. The stooped flowers in their sodden beds endure backpinch and rug-loss, what with all the stress about. Even the ...”

“... the Mayor of Berlin that he mustn’t think too much about it – ‘these things happen every day in Iran.’) Gudrun Ensslin’s verdict on these events was both typical of what many young radicals felt and a manifesto for what was to come: This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organise resistance. Violence is the only way to answer ...”

“... about him. One could be expelled from this club. The early death of Calder coincided almost to the day with that of Walker, Perkin as he was called – Wilson’s friend from Westminster days. Drabble seems to know all about him; her portrait convinced and surprised me. Here, it emerges, was a man given, like Wilson, to nightmares, to bouts of uncontrolled ...”

“... Among the testimony of others (former nuns, social workers), we are given an account by Robin Fox, editor of the Lancet, written after a visit to Mother Teresa’s ‘operation’ in Calcutta. Dr Fox, although favourably disposed towards Mother Teresa’s work, found that medical facilities for the ill and the dying were not only woefully ...”