“... witness at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in ...”

“... haunt their surviving son. No longer hungry, unable to pick up a fork or pee, they are baffled by their posthumous condition. ‘Something’s off but I don’t know what,’ the father says. That line could stand as a shorthand description of much of Saunders’s fiction, which, over twenty years and four collections, has often revelled in a sense of ...”

“... first this insight dismays him, but he comes to accept that the past ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events’ and that ‘he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.’ He is suddenly relieved. It seems there is a permanence to things that both guarantees one’s own tribulations and makes ...”

“... It​ seems to be a foregone conclusion that Vanessa Bell isn’t much good. There are those devoted types, of course, for whom the sensibility of her paintings, as well as their subjects, makes them windows into a beloved world. But perhaps they are seeing something more than this. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising; they have been looking the longest ...”

“... unpersuasive, counterpoint to the nightmarish vision of the hyper-capitalist gig economy envisaged by Tory Brexiteers. It isn’t, however, the alternative Remainers crave. A split is emerging between career politicians in the two main parties and the 48 per cent who voted Remain. Most Remainer MPs have moved on, leaving the Remainer public with no reliable ...”

“... more than two hundred drawings are almost universally accepted today as being wholly or in part by his hand, and most experts would argue for a much higher figure. Substantial though these numbers are, it is clear that only a tiny fraction of the drawings that he produced has survived. For example, there are famous studies of individual figures on the ...”

“... resistance to the idea of African contingents bearing arms on European soil. Churchill was enraged by what he saw as the stupidity of this position. He was not alone. Charles Darnley Stuart Stephens, who had served in the Lagos police and commanded a battalion of British Nigerians some forty years earlier, wrote in the English Review in 1916 recommending the ...”

“... great-grandchildren’. Not long to wait. Others are less sanguine. The history of philosophy can be cause for dismay. We are, after all, still asking questions Plato asked 2500 years ago. What is knowledge? What is justice? What is a name? In the ‘linguistic turn’ of the mid-20th century, such inquiries were interpreted as calling for investigation of ...”

“... The most arresting scene​ in Beverly, the first book by the American cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’. A boy sits outside a locked motel room as rhythmic groans emanate from the other side of the door: his parents have stolen a moment alone, thinking the kids are at the pool ...”

“... One of the few​ facts of American history of which Donald Trump appears to be aware is that George Washington owned slaves. Trump mentioned this in 2017 as one reason for his opposition to the removal of the monuments to Confederate generals that dot the southern landscape. In Trump’s view owning slaves probably enhances Washington’s reputation: like him, the first president knew how to make a buck ...”

“... 1986-92); It’s Only Ray Parlour (Arsenal midfielder, 1992-2004); Stillness and Speed: My Story by Dennis Bergkamp (Arsenal striker, 1995-2006); Addicted by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 ...”

“... of times. The more I try to describe why it was compelling the worse it sounds. You had to be there.Patricia Lockwood is blunt about the difficulty of transposing the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues.’ Explaining a meme confines it to a dusty ...”

“... as a second language and became the leading ESL writer of his generation, with a style marked by neologisms (‘smileful’, ‘unsmiled’), off-trail Latinisms (‘fenestral’, ‘penumbral’) and the literal use of words such as ‘febrile’, ‘redolent’ and ‘exude’. His aesthetic – stirring yet amiable, not entirely un-Rushdie-like ...”

“... after Jaurès. At its centre is an imposing statue showing him delivering a speech, surrounded by attentive miners. It was here that Jaurès first saw class struggle at close quarters, in the miners’ strike of 1892. Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, the leader of the miners’ union, was sacked from his job after being elected town mayor, on the pretext that his ...”

“... singing alternates with chant incipits: one or several of the sopranos will begin a new section by chanting the first few words, before the other voices weave around them. Victoria’s Requiem was not especially admired in its time, but since its rediscovery 150 years ago the mythology around it and the praise it has attracted have grown to fantastic ...”