“... of Artists International, International Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since ...”

“... Caritas Road. Their route skirted the city’s main thoroughfare, sealed off for more than a year by the Israeli Army to anyone other than Jews visiting the site of Rachel’s Tomb. From a hilltop in a silent residential quarter, the vigil filed down to the junction where the main road to Jerusalem reopens – but only as far as the Israeli roadblock five ...”

“... There is a beguiling poem by Raymond Carver which, like many modern poems, though more cheerfully than some, spends most of its short life mulling over the conditions of its own possibility. ‘A crow flew into the tree outside my window’: the ingenuous opening line at once establishes Carver in a realm of the purest contingency, where things just happen to happen ...”

“... It’s odd to think that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor, because most of the memorable American Presidents to follow him were actors in their blood. Eisenhower excelled in the part of the sturdy veteran who’d come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity: president of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as star of Bedtime for Bonzo ...”

“... a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark). Then he shifts to the ...”

“... When I was 12, I read a story by J.G. Ballard about a boy who has lived all his life in a vast city. One day, he decides to take a train out of the metropolis, to find a wide open space where he can fly a kite. But after many days on the train, he starts to recognise landmarks from the window that he has seen earlier in the journey: he has travelled all the way around the world without leaving the city ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of ...”

“... that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the ...”

“... of fifteen Capetian kings began in 987 when Hugh Capet was elected to the kingship of the Franks by his fellow magnates at Senlis, replacing the Carolingian dynasty that had ruled the kingdom of the Franks since Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III, deposed the last Merovingian king in 751. The lands the Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far ...”

“... deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that structure the world. These can be experiments in wish fulfilment: ‘What if we could live on other planets?’ Or they can be downright utopian: ‘What if time travel could eradicate poverty?’ They can also ...”

“... If you know​ anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film; in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential ...”

“... Blondie (1980) and in Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie (1982), an autobiography ghosted by Victor Bockris but written, supposedly, by Harry herself, in collaboration with her guitarist and then lover, Chris Stein.This new memoir is also ghosted, by Sylvie Simmons, and is ...”

“... on the saucy metaphors and sprinkling the demotic seasoning, when he is suddenly interrupted by a briefing from Public Health England or the chief medical officer: there is a nasty virus heading this way from China. So what does Superman do? Far from commissioning plans for an emergency response, he swirls his cape and takes the first available ...”

“... Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early 20th century housed, among other things, the printing house of Iskra, the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. ‘Lenin’s office’ still exists in a back room, though it is as fake as the library’s neo-Georgian façade. The ...”

“... It wasn’t long before music critics started talking about ‘slacker rock’. Epitomised by Pavement, a band of record shop clerks from suburban California who wrote detached, elliptical songs, this subgenre could be identified by the music’s stripped-back production and the ...”