“... isn’t one. It’s not sociology masquerading as fiction, which is the way Black novels are often read. ‘I don’t like my writing when it’s polemic,’ she told an interviewer. ‘As a human I love looking at the systemic issues, but as a writer I love the teeny-tiny instances that come from big socioeconomic issues.’ She’s deft with lists, executing ...”

“... advised rulers such as Dionysius of Syracuse. Then there’s the question of who’s meant to read prescriptive political philosophy that eschews a prescriptive political role for philosophers. Beside the stuff that pleases modern left secularists, such as Utopians’ communal property and their cautious attitude to war, there are some things they care ...”

“... had presided over uninterrupted economic growth, but it was weakened after its popular leader, Donald Tusk, left to take up the presidency of the European Council. (Tusk, a political alpha male, had made sure he had no prominent rivals or plausible successors.) Worse, the party was caught up in what came to be known as Waitergate. Illegal recordings from a ...”

“... servant in the Department of the Environment and had met his mother, a part-time typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my ...”

“... of foreboding or foreknowledge in the poetry is gainsaid by the line-by-line surprises as you read it – as you move, say, from a ‘cigarette-end smouldering on a border’ to the ‘plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel’ to the ‘strangled orchards’ to ‘the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats’. These words all come from ‘Consider This ...”

“... and easily reduced to reasonable terms, when you treat them with a high hand.’ The words read like something from Said’s Orientalism, the sentiments of a Balfour or Cromer, as parroted by a barrackroom sage or vainglorious subaltern, without the bland solvent of self-righteous statesmanship. In fact, they’re from Samuel Johnson’s first book, A ...”

“... good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards the glib or the showy (‘War is war and sometimes I think peace is too. Damn, there goes an epigram’), and often takes care to guard against it (‘didn’t ...”

“... none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of ...”

“... interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun. Moreover, if I wanted to read literature from the developing world, I would go ahead and read literature from the developing world. At least that way I’d learn something ...”

“... Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the ...”

“... book on the Moonies is one of the most striking pieces of investigative writing that I have read for a long time. It tells the story of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it ...”

“... the poet had died. Even within the brotherhood of the St Ives group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed ...”

“... 1944 in a letter to Frank, who would have enjoyed the affectionate teasing but wasn’t alive to read it. E.P. wrote poignantly about Frank and their time at the Dragon School: of his brother’s vulnerability – he was large and clumsy – and his own wish to fight on Frank’s behalf, blinded with tears, small fists flying left and right. Both boys ...”

“... capitalism, all of them shadowed by the threat of delusions and scams. It isn’t intended to be read as memoir. In 2017, Tolentino wrote a widely shared article for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual ...”

“... Minutes, ITV’s World in Action or the BBC’s Panorama. At the weekend, you might settle in to read one of America’s news magazines, Time or Newsweek, or one of the Sunday papers: Britain’s Observer or Mail on Sunday or the immense Sunday edition of the New York Times (its biggest ever number, on 14 September 1987, had 1612 pages and weighed 12 ...”