“... healthcare of the future would take place in general hospitals, and the number of beds would be halved, with care in the local community preferred wherever possible. Powell spoke in stirring and martial terms of setting ‘the torch to the funeral pyre’, ‘the defences we have to storm’ and ‘their powers of resistance to our assault’, to an ...”

“... a confession but a boast when he tells an interviewer: ‘I’m an incredible non-art lover.’ By that time he was a member of the English faculty at Cornell, where he taught for thirty years and lived for the rest of his life. Part of what ‘non-art’ means for Ammons is described in an early poem as ‘the non-song/in my singing’. Singing is usually ...”

“... discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose. That teacher, commemorated but unnamed in the poem ‘Them & [uz]’, was ...”

“... It’s a truth not quite so universally acknowledged that the semi-final against Denmark was won by the amazing Raheem Sterling taking an equally amazing dive to earn a penalty in extra time. It’s the kind of action that draws furious condemnation from opponents (sorry Denmark!) and neutrals (sorry world!) but gets laughed off, glossed over or celebrated ...”

“... the shows should mirror each other across several themes in ten galleries each. Delayed for a year by the pandemic, the retrospective arrives when Johns has turned 91 – an essential figure in the eyes of almost everyone who cares about postwar art.*Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold ...”

“... total collapse. The subsequent occupation was upheld through the use of torture and justified by the evidence of depleted uranium ammunition, a poor cousin of the weapons of mass destruction falsely held up as the reason for the invasion. Most former champions of the war accept that it led to an increase in global jihadist activity, culminating in the ...”

“... scrunched up’. The only really accurate word is ‘Goreyesque’. The term was in circulation by the time of his death, and doubtless long before among aficionados. When he did the Cavett interview Gorey was no longer a cult figure. His set and costume designs for a hit Broadway production of Dracula had brought him recognition and a great deal of ...”

“... was far from simple. In April 1436, when Cyriac of Ancona arrived in Athens, he was thrilled by his first sight of the Parthenon, the ‘marvellous marble temple of the goddess Pallas, the divine work of Phidias’. He counted its columns, admired its friezes and commented on the artistry with which Phidias had represented the battle of the Centaurs and ...”

“... or your browser, at least – to the website. (Cookies do have expiration dates, but they may be years in the future.) Then there are ‘pixels’. The type of pixel used as a tool to gather data is a tiny, transparent image, which you can’t see on your screen. When I first realised that, without knowing it, I must have downloaded pixels of this sort ...”

“... women in love, as it were – is decadent, in a country where there is so much development work to be done. But, she corrects, ‘I’m talking about a country where most people are women. We have a rural country made by women. Therefore, the true development of Mozambique is in the hands of women.’ And it is to women she ...”

“... Algerian independence.In 1962, with independence declared, I went back to Algeria. Vacancies left by close to a million fleeing Europeans meant that jobs were on offer in every ministry and sector. Before long, I found myself working in President Ahmed Ben Bella’s press and information office, where I received foreign journalists, scheduled appointments and ...”

“... that many of the problems we want intelligent computers to help us with can’t straightforwardly be solved with logic. Some of them – the ability to recognise faces, for example – don’t involve this kind of reasoning. In other cases – the diagnosis of disease would be an example from my own field – the difficulty ...”

“... Amiel goes so far as to list her friends and enemies at the back of the book, arranging them by country with a special ‘Borderline’ category within the UK list containing only Max Hastings. Swire is more sweeping in her acknowledgments to ‘all the Cameroons for not mentioning me or barely mentioning me in their memoirs – this is payback!’ But ...”

“... Council are on the staff of the IISS. Until he stepped down in July, Chatham House was led by Robin Niblett, who spent time at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. RUSI’s director-general, Karin von Hippel, was once chief of staff to the four-star American general John Allen. In 2021, RUSI’s second largest donor was the ...”

“... of June, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the bank, admitted that inflation in the UK – triggered by a combination of war in Ukraine and supply-chain bottlenecks in the wake of Covid lockdowns – is likely to endure for longer than in the United States or mainland Europe.At the end of June, data emerged from the European Commission which appeared to confirm ...”