“... Don’t mind if I do! But all this was still no substitute for live sport at the weekend. It may be that the featurelessness of lockdown time put more pressure on this weak spot or spot in the week. If the days are hard to tell apart, you’re more likely to feel the absence of something that used to differentiate week and weekend. But this can’t fully ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... was fifty. In a prophetic essay that appeared during the high Thatcher years, the young historian David Cannadine wrote in the LRB (6 June 1985) that ‘Briggs has often been described as a steam-engine scholar, pounding along the tracks of historical endeavour like an express train at full throttle.’ No ascetic, he loved good food and drink as much as ...”

“... of all Liverpool’s problems, though her monetarist experiment (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 May) exacerbated them by doing huge damage to Britain’s industry in the early 1980s. Her sub-Powellite rhetoric – ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’ – did nothing for race ...”

“... about his second film, Le Petit Soldat, he invoked Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai, which David Thomson has seen as ‘deconstructing’ film noir. Une femme est une femme reminded him of Lubitsch’s supposed ‘failure’, Design For Living, and Richard Quine’s decidedly minor My Sister Eileen. Godard treated Hollywood as a kind of conceptual ...”

“... the digital-oriented sense) that it’s not easy to see where the accumulated labour in them is. David Harvey’s lectures on Capital, for instance, the best beginning for anyone studying Marx’s most important book, are of immense value but they’re also available for free on the internet, so if you buy them as a book – you can take in information much ...”

“... stone in a peach and it must exist before one can ever begin to start thinking constructively. In May he decided to have a break and, on a friend’s recommendation, took a boat from Narragansett to Block Island. There he saw the charred remains of the Ocean View Hotel, which had once claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies. Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the ...”

“... Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia ...”

“... the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles of Gettysburg or the Wilderness had no more to offer wounded soldiers – except perhaps opium – than did their predecessors in the Persian or Punic Wars. As late as the Twenties there were only ...”

“... the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all. Literary scholarship may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it’s usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge. It’s frustrating that McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature ...”

“... its simplest, we are now putting the Sunday papers in the recycling bin, but at its less simple we may be seeking what Emerson called, in Nature, ‘an original relation to the universe’. The times may have become ripe for turning self-control into a form of evangelism, sensing that our wish to be the planet’s saviours ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”