“... a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab drivers in Rome and John McCain’s part in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... tears’. Kraus herself found the whole business decidedly silly: ‘From the beginning, it took an effort to hide my laughter over the howling.’The Attitudes, and the associated costumes, were expressions of the popular concept of the ‘living statue’. By wearing these dresses, women were styling themselves as figures from antiquity – cold ...”

“... an inmate’s sense of innate differences was often sharpened. When the Irish nationalist activist John Mitchel was transported in 1848, first to the hulks off Bermuda, then to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of his greatest torments was the perception that he was being treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... that Roth resolved never to write about Jews again. Of course he did, but from that point on he took pleasure in defying any party line. With a little effort you could make this sound like a triumph for the welcoming committee at Yeshiva. He had to abandon his assumption that the best way to be 100 per cent American was to be 100 per cent Jewish, and the ...”

“... may have made Gaskell up altogether. The parsonage hall is accurately rendered; perhaps Hassall took it from life.It’s not a particularly remarkable image, just the sort one comes across by accident, one of the many that illustrated the Brontës’ novels and books about them, as well as romances of famous lives, histories of great authors, worthies of ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... MacArthur won his many medals – relatively brief exposures, with MacArthur picking when they took place, buoyed by adrenalin and his public role – more closely resembles the courage needed by the war correspondents by whom he was usually surrounded in the field. A different kind, seldom recognised by medals or publicity, is asked of those who, when ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first ...”

“... or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration ...”

“... The trial​ of Argentina’s military leaders took place in Buenos Aires between April and September 1985. The court heard evidence against the nine most senior figures in the regime, including three former presidents – Videla, Viola and Galtieri. Sittings began each day in the early afternoon and often went on until after midnight ...”

“... which characterised the period of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Furthermore, its emergence took place ‘in the margin’: that is to say, outside the customary academic and intellectual writing centres in the United States. The Language Movement deliberately eschewed those centres and developed its own audiences, avenues of communication, and organs ...”

“... attack’, and by preferring, of the various accounts of Christian given by the survivor John Adams on Pitcairn, the one which is unfavourable. Christian’s Pitcairn was, of course, no more a paradise than Bligh’s Bounty. There were Tahitian women on Pitcairn, but not enough of them, and the results were another, bloodier mutiny and Christian’s ...”