“... or the real home of the imaginary Leopold Bloom, it’s like stumbling into a fiction you feel you may not be able to get out of. ‘Argentinians don’t believe in circumstances,’ Borges once wrote. The context is a rather flimsy essay called ‘Our Poor Individualism’, in which he argues for a form of nationalism which refuses the nation in its ...”

“... reporter, a man who admires her in spite of her wealth and manners, not because of them. She may even have slept with him, for all she can remember, and her prospective second husband believes she has. The reporter says not, because there are rules about taking advantage of girls who have had too much champagne. He’s not a toff but he is a gent. It’s ...”

“... even the Norwegian peace-brokers, is suspected because it is an outsider. The Rajapaksa government may not have started the present round of hostilities – it was provoked by the Tigers, who seem to have used the ceasefire to regroup and rearm – but it has set the tone of discussion here, with its paranoid comments about the Tigers infiltrating the UN, the ...”

“... canvas delivers égalité, that principle amounts to no more than defensive containment. Hals may not be ambitious, but his clients are, and it’s his task to corral them. He struggles a bit – witness the contrived matching arm-sweeps of the officers on the far left and far right – but he wrests from the challenge a concerted blare of hot (and ...”

“... In​ 2015 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, announced that there would be an inquiry into undercover policing and the operation of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS). This secret unit, whose purpose was to infiltrate subversive groups, was set up in 1968 as part of Special Branch in response to protests against the Vietnam War ...”

“... intoxicated, seemingly lost.This collective presentation of whiteness becomes monotonous, which may have been Washington’s intention, but the result is less successful than in his earlier books, where he focused on the specific ways that individuals (such as the well-meaning NGO worker in Lot) use their whiteness to their advantage. In Family ...”

“... remarkable early candlelights alongside the mezzotint reproductions Wright commissioned (until 10 May). The charisma of the grandest pictures – natural philosophers demonstrating in the glow of a lamp or candle; a shaggy-haired alchemist lit up by a burst of phosphorus – helps to explain why he began painting night pieces. The 1760s was the first decade ...”

“... A little strange, that, I thought. But I said, ‘That’s where I’m going, so perhaps I may give you a lift?’ ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ And we got into the car and drove off. At first neither of us spoke. I was concerned with joining the stream of traffic in Lower Regent Street. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Are you ...”

“... you, to ease the burden of the present, and I in the knowledge that no matter how bleak the moment may be, how futile or helpless it may seem, nothing can prevent our love, nothing can ever come between us.Where another writer might have chosen a more explicitly religious word, like the ‘hereafter’ or the ...”

“... defeat – the vengeful fury unleashed by the Czechs on the Sudeten German population after May 1945 as the Benes Government looked the other way. And they also explain the lack of any effective democratic resistance to the Communist putsch of 1948, and the failure of the Prague Spring of 1968. Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk has often been ...”

“... For Idle hands to do. In Books, or Work, or healthful Play, Let my first Years be past, That I may give for every Day Some good Account at last. Benjamin Franklin was soon working up his secularised version of the Puritan ethos. In Poor Richard’s Almanac (1758) he assured his readers that ‘sloth, by bringing on diseases, absolutely shortens ...”

“... flat as possible. American higher education allows much freedom of choice, and English students may practically major in Ulysses, but Teacher has the duty of keeping it from doing them harm. No weaker hypothesis, I submit, can explain the glee with which Kenner reports a total agreement of modern experts that Molly has been pure during the ten years without ...”

“... a bunch of overgrown kids playing at dressing up – which was, in its way, even more alluring. We may be different, they seemed to be saying, but we’re also just like you. As well as the familiar ambiguities of gender and sexuality, in the best of the Ziggy songs Bowie channels both the extraterrestrial superstar and the crooked-toothed boy from Bromley: he ...”

“... volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles. After the Nazi invasion in May 1940, the French began detaining ‘enemy aliens’: anyone of German (or Austrian or Sudeten) origin, including refugees from the Nazis, was suspect. The drafts of ‘undesirables’ in the summer of 1940 included nearly ten thousand women, hundreds with ...”

“... could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing making fun of her; if the assault ‘was ...”