“... Im not​ as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave ...”

“... reply to the moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of Isis … And we should get on to much more important things and much bigger things.’ Then he promised to ...”

“... to ride’ with ‘my first vision of the liberal life’. The comedy is immediately underlined by his wry acknowledgment of how much larger he has grown in the interim (‘I further ask myself what my age could possibly have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later developments’). A much quoted passage from the second chapter of ...”

“... reviews, earthquakes, girlfriends/boyfriends: arguably all of these reduce potential sales, either by putting us off the work or simply by taking up our time or resources. If we’re going to ban downloading because it reduces potential sales, we could argue that sex should be banned on ...”

“... their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe. Some archives, like the Stasi files in Germany, stay open. Some open and then hurriedly close again when the political weather changes. Some are clutched tight by governments which only use ...”

“... 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 ...”