“... where we can’t put together the bland colour images of the present with the grisly black and white pictures of the past. What on earth can it mean to say this is the same place? At another moment the narrator recalls a film made during the first year of the Occupation, a light comedy called Premier Rendez-vous. The physical film seems strange to him when ...”

“... on the banks of a river of transparent water that raced over a bed of polished stones as huge and white as prehistoric eggs.’ Characters from the novel appear here as fragments of history: the boy who sees ice for the first time, the girl who eats earth, the military man who makes golden fishes, the woman who bakes caramel sweets, the banana company and the ...”

“... deserted barns Of grey stone, among grey houses, within grey villages, But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass. Little Romanesque shrines with stocky frames, like craftsmen shaped by their labour, Pascal’s invisible church, sewn into canvas, And slim cathedrals like herons above the cities, seen clearly from the ...”

“... Pentagon’s judge advocate generals, and based his decision instead on an analysis provided by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, a former corporate lawyer from Texas. The suspects, who have still not been charged or granted access to counsel, remain at Guantanamo: at least 14 have attempted suicide. There is no love lost between the Defense Secretary ...”

“... or the harsh structures of human conflict, ‘all the versuses of life/from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White …/the unending violence of US and THEM’. A ‘supporter’ is a ‘poetry supporter’, as if art was a team; and ‘the life of Leeds’ is ‘supported by the dead’. However, since the graveyard being described sits above a disused coalmine, the ...”

“... other selections from his working drafts. Yours Presently, the new volume of letters edited by Michael Seth Stewart, shows Wieners cutting across various groups in American avant-garde writing.‘A homosexual,’ Wieners wrote, ‘since he has been a stigma or outcast freak for so long, does not [usually] have a chance to meditate upon himself, even as a ...”

“... and triumphant myths that have remained triumphant: myths, for example, of Luther, as the white knight slaying the Papist dragon, or as a coarse buffoon for ever shitting metaphorically into Papal tiaras, or of a spoil-sport Calvin (responsible of course for Apartheid), or of a Voltairean Erasmus, a mere dilettante in theological matters, or of a ...”

“... the Elder struck political gold during the 1988 Presidential campaign by castigating his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a liberal, virtually no American politician will voluntarily accept the label. One unlikely exception is Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s new billionaire Republican Mayor, who during the campaign ...”

“... an artificial vagina. But this was one procedure no one dared attempt.The 11th-century philosopher Michael Psellus anticipated contemporary thought in treating gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. Here Betancourt’s close attention to the nuances of Greek literary language pays off. Psellus claimed to have a compassionate, deeply emotional – and ...”

“... I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the Scottish Gymnastics Display Team, and an elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, and a man tattooed from neck to wrist, and possibly lower, who was working his way loudly through a large box of Quality Street ...”

“... Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This was the first part of the capital – and the country in general – to open itself up to the new ...”

“... at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend they were workmen called Bill and Jim ...”

“... were showcasing their heavy artillery with a leak of their own, which had to have come from the White House staff or intelligence agents on the scene. Mostly, however, the article seemed to be an excuse to deploy the expression ‘Putin Butts In’ – a cut below the diction once permitted in the Times. This descent into brashness, which teeters on the ...”

“... two years later when the parliamentary Conservative Party effectively staged a coup, installing Michael Howard as the sole candidate without consulting the membership. In 2007, Lib Dem members chose Nick Clegg over Chris Huhne as their leader by the narrowest of margins. Given that Huhne was to end up in jail in 2013 you might think this was the wise ...”

“... degree of moral disdain. In the Heat of the Night has a scene in which Mr Tibbs is slapped by a white man and slaps him right back: for many people, that was ‘1968’ writ large, and, through a fusillade of old-guard objections, along with objections from the new guard that it wasn’t enough, it seemed that the cinema might never be the same ...”