“... and resumed. ‘Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,’ and she took up her soup spoon, ‘was he as good?’ Unbriefed on the subject of the glabrous playwright and novelist, the president looked wildly about for his minister of culture. But she was being addressed by the Archbishop of ...”

“... on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin American economists, as well as a small Stilton cheese in a china jar. This had been purchased at Fortnum and Mason, on the recommendation of my Chilean friend Claudio Véliz, the Latin American ...”

“... Some​ of the more pessimistic commentators at the time of the credit crunch, myself included, said that the aftermath of the crash would dominate our economic and political lives for at least ten years. What I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast ...”

“... of an admittedly strange and somewhat ill-starred career, Maude Hutchins seems to have provoked more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in ...”

“... arrest of Arab children in Israel and Jerusalem. Parts of the Israeli press have been considerably more forthcoming and straightforward in their reporting and commentary on what has been taking place than the US and European media. Writing in Ha’aretz on 12 November, Gideon Levy noted with alarm that most of the handful of Arab members of the Knesset have ...”

“... old. During the lesson, we choristers had been exchanging notes, probably sniggering at one of the more pompous priests – the one who, as he processed towards his stall, held his clasped hands pointing outwards from his breast, like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were singing ‘O Nata Lux’ by ...”

“... Setting the record straight is only a modest part of Carpenter’s project in this biography. His more ambitious aim is to relate Britten’s emotional and sexual life to his music. This is a tall order; it’s clear that Carpenter doesn’t really appreciate how tall. He identifies and catalogues the links between Britten’s music and other aspects of his ...”

“... it explores the impulse to self-impose a siege and accept a tightly monitored environment. All the more impressive, then, that it pushes back against the morbid and precautionary aspects of lockdown.It did no harm to the film’s reception that the insecurities induced by Covid were compounded in Northern Ireland by Brexit. While Belfast was in ...”

“... level, are long lines of seats for the many lawyers. Eleven men sit in a glass box, with three more in front. These are the accused. Outside the room, a line of TV reporters wait to capture the reactions of those leaving the court.The discussions that take place inside are the result of five years of investigation. The work has been careful and ...”

“... the first time, with any expectation of the riches of Woolf’s. For Forster the diary was of far more spasmodic usefulness, and for long stretches of his long and oddly shaped life might well not be a writer’s diary at all. As he acknowledged, ‘unfortunately I only open this book when my heart aches’; and even then there can be passages as stoically ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”

“... under political control and getting rid of ‘haggling’ (Schacher). Friedrich Engels was more specific, asserting in 1878 that socialism would eliminate the ‘social anarchy’ of capitalist free markets by delivering ‘social regulation of production upon a definite plan’. Forty years later Lenin promised to rejuvenate Russia with a ...”

“... of 2018, Apple became the first public company in the world to have a market capitalisation of more than a trillion dollars. Today, each of the ten biggest companies in the world is worth more than $1 trillion. Only one of them, the Saudi oil monopoly, Aramco, has nothing to do with the future value of AI. The top ...”

“... leave a message, and out loud you curse her, calling her an arrogant bitch, but the beep is much more sudden than you expect and you realise you’ve been recorded. Such moments are small catastrophes, and the only way we have of dealing with them is to behave as though they had never happened or persuade ourselves that their impact is less dreadful than it ...”

“... things seemed normal: D.F. Heaney’s, the newsagent; Kernan’s Fruit – Veg. A few small shops, more like parlours than shops, are devoted to ladies’ fashions, with names like Scruples and Elegance. You always see these places in Ireland and Scotland – hard against the chip shop – with tall mannequins and their big eyelashes. A flow of youngsters came ...”