“... of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. During his schooldays in Monaco he was known as Cointreau-Whisky, and his poetry includes characters with equally peculiar monikers ...”

“... jury, referring to defence claims that Floyd had died because his heart was enlarged and weakened by drug abuse. ‘The truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr Chauvin’s heart was too small.’ ‘Policing is the most noble profession,’ the state prosecutor, Steve Schleicher, insisted.To ...”

“... the amount of rainfall – eighteen inches in two hours – has eclipsed a hundred-year flood. If by some improbable sequence of events you manage to get the insurance adjusters to agree to it, you must build to match existing when another flood marches through a month later.I heard the phrase for the first time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, listening to an ...”

“... Hotel by the Sea’ (1946) Three women,​ all in their way members of the higher bohemia, were having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948 ...”

“... are exploiting a tragedy to advance their anti-freedom agenda.’ Meanwhile, NRA fundraisers will be trying to reach all their five million members to let them know that this time it’s serious, the liberals are coming for their guns, and they need to dig deep and donate whatever can be spared to ‘freedom’s safest ...”

“... Polish and Jewish identities, the first being the one he chose, the second the one fixed on him by others, in particular other Poles. The dichotomy comes from Bauman’s own autobiographical reflections, ‘The Poles, the Jews and I: An Investigation into Whatever Made Me What I Am’, written in the 1980s not for publication but for his daughters. Wagner ...”

“... St Jerome in His Study’ (1474-75) by Antonello da Messina. Last March​ , in response to the pandemic and the confinement of daily life to the walls of my home, one of the pictures in my care as a curator at the National Gallery assumed a new significance: Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in Venice in the mid-1470s represents the early Christian saint in the nonpareil of home offices ...”

“... political and economic position. While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global ...”

“... his wife’s taste for life in Oslo high society. When Tesman’s aunt asks him what the book will be about, he says it will deal with the domestic industries of Brabant in the Middle Ages. ‘Fancy,’ she says. ‘To be able to write a book on such a subject as that!’ Ejlert Løvborg is Tesman’s academic rival – and ...”

“... Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee for the fifth time. This greatly disappointed him: he was desperate to travel – he had ‘not been literally anywhere’ – and was stuck in a dreary job as a copywriter at the publishing house McGraw-Hill. The manuscript he had ...”

“... Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, some Soviet writers interpreted it as an act of protest: stifled by political censorship, he couldn’t go on. In the decades since, the suicide of the great poet of the Revolution has been seen as the Soviet Union’s point of no return. This is the view taken by the Swedish scholar Bengt ...”

“... the world through other people’s eyes, via fieldwork and cultural interpretation, and frequently by inhabiting a community over a number of years.Marx was no stranger to this dilemma. Co-opting Hegel’s language, he drew a distinction between people being a class ‘in themselves’, when they are seen to act in their objective material interests, and ...”

“... are two scenes that flare to life. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after the victory. This song seems to emerge from the collective mouth of the dead – the dead lying on the lawn of the ...”

“... spent time at any of the private colleges and universities in the US, you may have been struck by something mirage-like about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with ...”

“... was deliberately, even ostentatiously, low key. He wore his hair short, insisting that one could be shorn and still be a poet (it was also legitimate, he said, to pay your rent, sleep with your wife and, now and then, to write proper French). When, at thirty, he became bald, he rejoiced at being liberated from the company ...”