“... prosopographical breakthrough: a book confidently entitled The Most Evil Men and Women in History (Michael O’Mara, £15.99) and with a cover where the word ‘evil’ appears in black in a type size several magnitudes greater than that of its supporting syntax. Nor should we be surprised for a second time to find that this is a set of potted life-stories to ...”

“... Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week). Blondness ...”

“... Michael Longley​ died a year and a half ago, at which point, as Auden put it in his elegy for Yeats, ‘he became his admirers.’ As happens with any great poet, what those admirers had long appreciated as a succession of fine individual poems and volumes unobtrusively reorganised itself into the completed order of a life’s work ...”

“... preventable deaths. They are Antonio Bradley, Anibal Carrasquillo, Ricardo Cruciani, Albert Drye, Michael Lopez, Elijah Muhammed, Michael Nieves, Mary Yehudah and Tarz Youngblood. The name ‘Rikers Island’ conjures a monolithic structure, but there are ten correctional facilities on the island, seven of which are ...”

“... these matters his new partner, who has stayed with him for the whole of his business life, Gordon White, boasted to a Sunday Mirror gossip columnist: ‘Why should I marry? I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to ...”

“... What​ was it like growing up in black and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the past, as I had perceived it, was defined by an absence of colour ...”

“... Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t bear to watch himself on screen – his voice is confident, almost suave. There’s a moment in his least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice ...”

“... especially but not exclusively in the South, have understood freedom as an entitlement limited to white people. Cowie argues that ‘white freedom’ has long entailed the power to dominate others, especially non-whites, without interference from the national government. The fear that ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her ...”

“... her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor sings ‘She Moves through the ...”

“... a sexual relationship with an English teacher that began when she was 13, wrote online that ‘a white woman has written a book that fictionalises a story many people have survived and the book is receiving tremendous backing and promotion.’ Ortiz described ‘eerie story similarities’ between My Dark Vanessa and Excavation, but stopped short of accusing ...”

“... foreground whom at first we barely notice: a typical Poussin figure, half-asleep on the ground, white-haired and a little overweight: as if death, if we’re lucky, will be a long weary half-consciousness of water still flowing (the figure is a river god holding a jar whose contents spill through his fingers) and a shelf of grass. Death is everywhere at ...”

“... to mean many things apart from indissoluble union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their ...”

“... an unspeakable wilderness swinging a crookhandled stick for all weapon with two bull-dogs, Paddy (white) and Biddy (brindle) at his heels and a Loanda boy carrying a bundle for all company. A few months afterwards it so happened that I saw him come out again, a little leaner, a little browner, with his stick, dogs and Loanda boy, and quietly serene as though ...”

“... There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama ...”