“... yes: fork-bending no. The question is not this simple, however. In the books by Dr Finucane, by Andrew Mackenzie and by Susan Blackmore, there are countless contemporary experiences of ‘psychic’ phenomena. They are all very carefully classified: out-of-the-body experiences, psychokinesis (the ability to move objects without physical contact or any known ...”

“... task should be so ridiculously easy: ‘One had to forget ... that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart.’ Killing is simple and hard in Nabokov: child’s play and yet ...”

“... smooth stuff.’Born in 1893, Long was one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling ...”

“... attitudes and determinations were present in Quartermaster-Sergeant Grieve of Salonika. The young Grieve describes himself as being in ‘mental spate’; his intellectual life is ‘a debating society’, and he tells Ogilvie: ‘I feel like a buried city.’ These letters sizzle with energy; they also show an anxious desire to impress and, at moments ...”

“... know. I pick my way carefully back, cheered up no end.Later we watch God’s Own Country, about a young and unhappy shepherd in Yorkshire who takes on a Romanian immigrant and is emotionally educated by him, learning to care as much for his fellow man as he does for his sheep. It’s a bleak film, shot somewhere above Keighley I imagine, the farmhouse ...”

“... I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... be consulted on the decision? ‘These are people who have grown up saying, “Yes, sir,”’ Andrew Bacevich, a retired career officer in the US army, replied when I put the question to him. (In his recent speech following the death of four American soldiers in Niger, Kelly essentially said that the best Americans are lying in the ground of Arlington ...”

“... his sister on the day of a family party. The prosecutor in the case was Christie, and he and the young Kushner are said to have been at odds throughout the campaign. So far the Trump regime seems to consist of four factions, bound together by personal loyalty to the president-elect, some of it long-standing, most of it recent and opportunistic. There is ...”

“... a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality’. In his book A Way of Life (1984), he writes of wanting, ‘in a modest way, to use the ...”

“... from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge. His subsequent academic career started at Selwyn College, diverted to Sydney University and ended, fifteen years on, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: a downward mobility which Jacobson seems to have ...”

“... Peter Hujar, was dying of complications from Aids. When they were together in 1960s New York, Andrew Durbin writes in his joint biography, other people felt ‘extraneous in the room’; a younger gay man, watching them being extravagantly gay at a time when most homosexuals were in the closet or existed in a ‘semi-neuter’ state, thought that ‘if ...”

“... In 1892 A.C. Benson published an essay which introduced the modern appreciation of Andrew Marvell. For more than two hundred years Marvell’s verse had shared with Metaphysical poetry a lowness of esteem which now seems puzzling. As the Cyclopaedia of English Literature explained in 1844, Marvel ‘is better known as a prose writer than a poet, and is still more celebrated as a patriotic member of parliament ...”

“... posed in the studio. The subjects are deceit and seduction: one (known only from copies) shows a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet ...”

“... a relatively restrained backlash: Christian groups in the States have claimed that a saga about a young wizard must necessarily be satanically inspired, and A.S. Byatt has implied that if Rowling made a deal with the devil she should have held out for greater imaginative powers. It’s hardly a revelation that War and Peace and Ulysses have more prestige than ...”

“... diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion. It was an age of military dandyism like no other. Was there, then, a case for cracking down on the monstrous millinery of war? Was towering headgear really necessary to overawe the enemy? How many British ...”