“... ironed out by the time of the European Commission meeting last March, Brexit news has mostly been light relief in the Bulgarian press. Westminster and Brussels feel very far away, even though it’s predicted that a third of Bulgarian businesses will lose out after the UK’s departure, and that the price of imported cars and medicine will rise ...”

“... provides testimony which brings out its susceptibility to romantic and dualistic interpretation. Donald Davie has written lately in this journal: ‘Great poetry is greatly sane, greatly lucid; and insanity is as much a calamity for poets and for poetry as for other human beings and other sorts of human business.’ These are impressive words. But of course ...”

“... I want to know why we, like upside-down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than the light.Rachael Berdach,The Emperor, the Sages and Death (1938)What​ is left of the inner life when the world turns more cruel, or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows – pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation or all these together – what happens to the fabric of the mind? Is its only option defensive – to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge, or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the broken pieces and muddled fragments that make us who we are? Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones to lament that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war ...”

“... been excavated. It’s a mistake. Walking through these tall narrow chambers, none with natural light and few with more than the faintest fresco, I feel it’s no more inspiring than a tour round a 19th-century municipal gasworks, which it undoubtedly resembles. Most of the party wear headphones and follow the cassette guide and so become dull and bovine in ...”

“... Burglary in Pangbourne I attended once where they done it halfway up the wall in an 18th-century light fitting. Any other sphere and they’d have got the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.’ ‘You’ve perhaps not noticed,’ Mr Ransome said grimly, ‘but we don’t have any light fittings.’ ‘Another one in Guildford did ...”

“... and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could. In the theatre: ‘the escape from life, the oblivion of ...”

“... In the early years of his rule, Alawite villages were transformed: oil lamps gave way to electric light; dirt tracks became paved roads. Buses began to reach isolated mountain villages – buses that soon carried sons into the military, intelligence services and state bureaucracy. The geography of Syria shifted, as coastal towns like Jableh – once dominated ...”

“... a kind of brand-name or designer label, which could be attached to gallery art, film, rock music, light shows and books, eventually extending the ‘franchise’ to include magazines, Polaroid photographs, TV talk shows and other appearances. In his Dazed and Confused interview, Damien Hirst talks about his interest in designing billboards and his interviewer ...”

“... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...”

“... performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There was a less selfish aspect too: Dad wouldn’t ...”

“... knows? Blue Nights is dedicated to Quintana. The reference in the title is to a colour of evening light – ‘the French called this time of day “l’heure bleue”.’ You see it first in late April when ‘suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise,’ but only in certain latitudes: in New York, for example, where Didion now lives, but not ...”

“... heyday and personalities of modernism. He wrote little (‘The mason stirs:/words!/Pens are too light./Take a chisel to write’), but what he wrote ever more powerfully endures. Reading him now, there is an overpowering drench of the 1920s and 1930s, and a suggestion of how the style of progressive verse might have gone on, if Pound hadn’t disappeared ...”

“... intricate things around. Which, of course, they often are: what need is there, he asks, for Donald Judd when there’s the Isle of Grain? There are gleefully lowbrow jokes and visual gags too, often at Meades’s expense. Much of Museum without Walls, which is organised into sections on place, memory, blandness, ‘edgelands’ and urban ...”

“... death she suppressed many of his letters, in order to present herself in a more positive light, and told false stories about their life together. (‘The silence of the famous dead,’ as Janet Malcolm put it, ‘offers an enormous temptation to the self-promoting living.’) Alma even interfered with Mahler’s compositions, demanding – based on ...”

“... the bible of anti-Semites everywhere. One of Zubeidat’s home care clients, a loose screw called Donald Larking, passed along conspiracist libertarian newspapers and magazines. The internet provided even more enticing forms of inflammatory propaganda – lectures by the al-Qaida recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki and the like – and the opportunity to share ...”