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“... had a brief and stormy career, in Paris, in the years around the outbreak of the First World War. His chief influences were Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry and the Italian Futurists; he preceded by a few years the Dadaists and Surrealists, who acclaimed him a pioneering figure. He was, André Breton said, a ‘barometer’ of the avant-garde. As a heavyweight ...”

“... formally charged with murder, and the trial, which finally began on 16 January 2009, a propaganda war raged between those who sided with the prosecution and Knox’s supporters – the ‘innocentisti’ and the ‘colpevolisti’, as they were soon termed. The report prepared by Judge Matteini for the pretrial was leaked to the Italian press, which gleefully ...”

“... to learn, on pain of death, the conjugation of various auxiliary verbs. Called to the front of the class, he soon makes a gross mistake in the dual of the aorist, and instantly suffers the threatened punishment. During his lifetime, despite the howls of derision his work regularly inspired, Roussel steadfastly refused to offer either explanation or ...”

“... Dray makes the point in a closely-argued piece on conflicting interpretations of the English Civil War. Historians come up with all manner of methodical checks and contrivances to give their narratives some semblance of objective truth. In fact, these refinements of method are always embedded in a larger sense of what properly counts as convincing historical ...”

“... rarely happens,’ he said to Boswell, ‘that a man is fit to plead his own cause, lawyers are a class of the community, who, by study and experience, have acquired the art and power of arranging evidence, and of applying to the points at issue what the law has settled. A lawyer is to do for his client all that the client might fairly do for himself.’ And ...”

“... is now a parking lot. The 1980s were a tumultuous time. Saudi Shia suffered badly in the tug of war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Countless numbers were arrested and tortured; many more fled or disappeared. The crackdown left a permanent scar. Shia were required to be loyal citizens without being treated as such. They began to feel the effects of ...”

“... books have often taught other truths – that the best thing you can be is white, upper or middle class, and if you are a girl, quiet. Many have taught children to revere the aristocracy, conquer the wilderness and condescend to the poor. Our girl heroes have nearly always been thin, and their thinness offered as a shorthand for their spare clarity of ...”

“... for the delicatessen’ and selling brooms door to door.After a spell in the Navy during the war, he enrolled in Kenyon College where he found it hard to keep up with the work (although he broke ‘the school’s beer-chugalug record’). A classmate told Stern that even in the hard drinking culture of the school, Newman was famous, and would ‘run ...”

“... and answer his own question with ‘Because it does.’ Anthony’s parents were solidly middle class, his father ‘an Italian Irish pugnacious race warrior’ who taught African American history and literature in private schools, his mother a Black woman whose family owned businesses in Mobile and Birmingham. When Anthony was expelled from Columbia for ...”

“... him so obsessed with sin in all its forms that when he was given a ration of whiskey as a Civil War soldier, he poured it on the ground to prevent anyone from drinking it. It was Comstock who in 1873 persuaded legislators to pass the Act for the Suppression of the Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, usually known as ...”

“... others, Dickens, Propertius and Pierre Guyotat’s monstrously abject and disjointed Algerian War memoirs. Running through the middle, as Kraus says, was a stream of grotesquely skewed autobiography: ‘the threat and promise of inheritance … like the River Styx’.It was a bit from Great Expectations that Kraus herself saw Acker perform at the Mudd ...”

“... the buoyant state of the American economy. But the opposite could also be true. Our ‘political class’ may have felt so free to indulge itself in this orgy of partisanship because times are good and dangers seem remote. Certainly no Republican Congress would have attempted to ‘hunt and destroy’ a Democratic President during the Cold ...”

“... the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy out in public perhaps deserved to ‘get jumped’. Though I’d read about Trump supporters shouting ‘Sieg heil!’ at his Southern rallies, I was surprised to see Confederate flag ...”

“... unteachable. In 1900, he attended the classes of Eugène Carrière. An Englishman in the same class, Vernon Blake, described an encounter between pupil and teacher: ‘Pardon me, M. Carrière,’ interposed Matisse, ‘but you have not corrected my study!’ ‘Haven’t I? I beg your pardon’ ... He placed himself before the astonishing medley of ...”

“... girl, you only have to ask your mother, but I was never expelled from school.’ During the recent war and after, my father had busied himself wheeling and dealing in the black market. He’d cooked at least one set of accounting books that had him in prison before I was old enough to remember, and somehow or other gone bankrupt more than once. Between the ...”