“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bars, slashing his way through video games and death-metal lyrics, encountering a time-travelling Donald Duck. Even stranger, as a figure embraced by both the far right and the left, El Cid has also come to stand as an emblem of democracy and pluralism. Berend is writing with deicidal intent: once the myth has been fully exposed to the light of fact, she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... With hindsight​ what is most shocking about Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on 27 June 2024 is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young. Trump was at that point the second oldest presidential candidate in American history – second only to Biden – yet Biden’s intermittently ashen, waxen, leaden, frozen performance had the effect of giving Trump a youthful glow ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of reality, not as cheap band music’; to listen to Bach and avoid ‘catgut music’; and ‘to be pure of … laziness … pomposity ...”