“... reading, especially in his poems, there is a real possibility that the books he read mattered much more to Borges than the mere events of his life. Six months before his father’s death, Williamson points out, Borges wrote a book review for an Argentine magazine which is much more likely to have offered the inspiration for ...”

“... in the Poor Law legislation for Ireland going through the House of Commons: any family holding more than a quarter of an acre could not be granted relief, either in or out of the workhouse, until they gave up their land.Thus landlords who wanted to move from tillage to livestock or dairy farming would now have a valuable opportunity to do so. They would ...”

“... the number of dead in China had barely budged: the epidemic there was under control. In the US, more than 23,000 had perished. By the time of Azar’s address to the assembly barely a month later, the Chinese toll had crept up to 4638, and was flat, while America’s dead numbered nearly ninety thousand, and the figure was still rising.That night in America ...”

“... Paul Vallely writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013). ‘He tried to make us more like a religious order,’ one of Bergoglio’s students recalled, ‘wearing surplices and singing the office … Bergoglio brought in an arch-conservative, the military chaplain from Moreno Air Base, to teach. He seemed unaware of any of the teachings of ...”

“... languages, yet it is observ’d of them, they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets Sam. Wesley, Daniel De Foe, and two or ...”

“... of a newspaper article he thought she might be interested in. They met for coffee and became more relaxed with each other. Later he recruited her as a member of the small rotating committee of friends, an editorial micro-minyan, to whom he sent drafts of his books. Roth Unbound has his blessing but wasn’t vetted by him, and Pierpont feels free to ...”

“... another corner, this time for keeps … The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I’m less alive. There’s less life to lead. I can’t give 100 per cent attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.There were jokes by now: ‘What turns fruits into vegetables?’; ‘What does gay stand ...”

“... support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating ...”

“... looking younger than she would have been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though ...”

“... of jobs to the area. Three thousand, according to some reports. Eight thousand, according to the more imaginative. Announcing in 2022 that the government was financially supporting the project (in fact, it never did), Boris Johnson and his ministers managed to include every trope of British industrial boosterism in a single press release. The new plant was ...”

“... Lizzie Hardwick’s letters. That seemed to me too much.Those unstoppable sonnets.I’m thinking more of the letters Lizzie wrote to him, which he then turned into more sonnets and then said I’m sorry about this at the end.Do you see any kind of road not taken for you in the way Lowell went about things? In all those ...”

“... how, from their first meeting at the Caprice, he had been mesmerised by Ashley. She was so much more than he could ‘ever hope to be’: ‘The reality … far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.’* It took a while for Ashley, along with her medical and legal advisers, to realise what Corbett was up to (nine ...”

“... countryside or travel through it and see someone at work in a field; the occasional tractor, no more. But the work gets done. The chequered pattern changes colour and texture, season by season. It’s surprising that we treat this epic, continual, land-defining endeavour as if it were both inevitable and eternal. The colliery tunnels have fallen in, the ...”

“... case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t half of Facebook? Isn’t the World Wide Web a new ether, in which we are all haunted by ghostwriters? I had written about missing persons and celebrity, about secrecy and ...”

“... he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been on the throne a little more than two years when Moumen Diouri, a revolutionary firebrand in his mid-twenties, was arrested. Diouri was the son of a staunch anti-colonialist who had been imprisoned under the French protectorate in Morocco. In the run-up to Algerian independence in ...”