“... remarking: ‘I tell you all this because in England, by some kind mistake his squabbles may be set down to me.’ Polidori, meanwhile, weeping with rage and fantasising revenge against the provocatively hatted officer and the governor, flounced off to find himself new patients, who promptly died. ‘Dr Polidori has, just now, no more ...”

“... homesickness.’ Homesick for Buchenwald? Fateless does not fit into any convention there may be for fiction about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to ...”

“... baptism by dipping, and low pews – ‘single and of equal height so that every person in them may be seen either kneeling or standing’.A letter the Reverend George Hickes submitted to one of the Commissioners – ‘Observations on Mr Vanbruggs Proposals about building the new churches’ – gives a good idea of the kind of ecclesiastical advice they ...”

“... flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence – an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve, a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more ...”

“... put their lives on the line to save the last surviving ancient Wollemi pines, a species that may date back to before the continents of Australia and Antarctica separated; in Spain, the last known bucardo was cloned by scientists and an embryo with a carbon copy of its DNA implanted in a goat surrogate mother in an attempt to keep the species ...”

“... of foreign capital to Britain, while leaving the EU is likely to accelerate an outflow that may dwarf the UK’s relatively modest net contribution to the EU budget. So going back to 1392 does not seem like a very sensible answer to our predicament. And how strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our ...”

“... been confined to the hothouse world of the intellectuals was carried beyond by the passions of May 1968. The May events were a festival of speech and desire and psychoanalysts were perceived as the professionals of both. In the context of May, Lacanianism had a special cachet. It was ...”

“... act: citizens have a right to call on an elected office-holder to resign, just as he or she may choose to stay in office until defeated at the polls. The petition said nothing about the army, let alone calling on it to act in the matter. The same was true of the mobilisation for the 30 June demonstrations. Several well-known groups that had played key ...”

“... be so is not at first glance clear. But two powerful – opposite, yet not unrelated – impulses may supply much of the explanation. On the one hand, the stifling parochialism and puritanism of an insular middle-class culture, with all its weight of boredom and repression, made escape abroad an instinctively attractive option for restless spirits: a motive ...”

“... should not admire life ‘as does the American’, although he occasionally by good chance may have admired some of it, he recoiled from most of it. If he was to live he must escape from the surface of life, and he found his asylum in his dreams; here was his workshop where he mended life … only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his ...”

“... The first​ big leader to livestream a message to the virtual World Health Assembly on 18 May was supposed to be Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa and chairman of the African Union, but something went wrong with the feed. Xi Jinping went first instead. We saw the president of China seated behind a highly polished table, in front of a mural showing rosy dawn creeping over the Great Wall ...”

“... but for the vast majority who remained in work, purchasing power expanded. And while free trade may have hit heavy industry hard, it kept food prices low. Even the advent of imperial protection in 1932 merely shifted the direction of imports, so that by the late 1930s two-thirds of imported food came from the empire – wheat from Canada, lamb from New ...”

“... humanity is famished, depleted, emptied out of any rich bourgeois inwardness; and though there may be an Irish memory of famine here for Beckett, Adorno could find in this image the poor forked creatures of Auschwitz. The Jew and the Irishman could find common ground in this stark extremity, as they find common ground in Ulysses and in many popular ...”

“... we often cannot confidently distinguish between the two. Even our list of possible outcomes may turn out to have omitted the ones that are most important in shaping events. Such an omission was one of the factors that led Long-Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund set up by two Nobel Prize winning economists, to fail in 1998-2000. The ...”

“... But when the news of the suicide of his close friend Margaret Cravens interrupted his trip, he may have realised abruptly that we live one irreplaceable life, and ghosts are no substitute for one’s companions. It was a turning point. Cravens was an aspiring pianist, dear to a number of people in Pound’s circle. An heiress, she had struggled with ...”