“... on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, published soon after Reagan became President, Frank Raven, an NSA official, is asked what happens when someone on whom the NSA is spying enters the US. ‘You have intelligence which is entirely foreign and you have intelligence which is entirely domestic,’ Raven says. ‘But then you have the third ...”

“... The huts and their contents have been preserved intact, and the photographs show intensely close details of things long left behind: ragged shirts and socks hanging up on lines, wooden cases forming a wall, a jar of fruit salts, bottled redcurrants and gooseberries, tins of dried onions and parsnips, reams of unused paper on a shelf, a small open book ...”

“... reputation, but it was not until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 – at the close of the Age of Aquarius, did we but know it – that he attained the worldwide renown, or infamy, as some might say, which he continues to enjoy and, if we are to believe The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife, to chafe under. Portnoy’s Complaint was the ...”

“... poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 shortly after he’d come under the spell of Frank O’Hara (of whom he later wrote: ‘So witty, so sad,/so you: even your lines have/a broken nose’). ‘Salute’ runs:Past is past, and if oneremembers what one meantto do and never did, isnot to have thought to doenough? Like that gather-ing of one of ...”

“... Goodere, Bart. The reiterated claim of genuineness trumps various competitors with his close family connection to the case. Foote’s theatrical career began under the tutelage of the veteran Irish actor and director Charles Macklin. Somewhat improbably, his first outing, in early 1744, was in the role of Othello. This was received well enough but ...”

“... can be thus summarily wished away in the interests of an uncluttered critical praxis. Frank Kermode’s Essays on Fiction are likewise preoccupied with the relationship between criticism and its broader institutional context. That he construes the relationship in very different terms is a measure of its deep ambivalence as regards the politics of ...”

“... run, Arbus became interested in the connections she could make, the seductions. She liked getting close to those she photographed. She wanted her own unsparing gaze to find a gaze returned. She wanted people to welcome her advances, to note her energy and give it back to her. She wasn’t interested in suffering or pain, or victims of accidents or ...”

“... a national embarrassment. Some demanded the end of Documenta altogether. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, responded by warning ‘there are limits’ to artistic freedom when it comes to political issues. Chancellor Scholz announced that for the first time in thirty years he wouldn’t be going to the show. The culture minister, Claudia ...”

“... where you are, but you’re not here.’He isn’t the only character in Homesickness who seems close to a breakdown. ‘Being depressed is like being in a dream,’ says another, shortly after he’s discharged from hospital. ‘The suspicion is that everyone you meet is actually depressed too.’ In the world of these stories, it’s a suspicion that ...”

“... it laborious compared to texting and messaging. ‘If it’s a professor you don’t have a close relationship with, you have to say, hi professor whatever, I’m in your class or I’m interested in this blah blah blah,’ one student says. ‘You have to kind of frame it.’ Several of the students surveyed watch recorded lectures at triple speed ...”

“... within, and not inferior examples of, the tradition which includes Dubliners and the stories of Frank O’Connor. They unsettle one’s sense of period by suggesting (no doubt correctly) that there are hidden tribes close to home practising rites and obeying taboos which have dropped below the horizon of fictional ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... she forced her patients to swallow the skin on their hot milk. To distant friends, for she had no close ones, she wrote vigorous letters, and especially to Oswald Faringdon, widowed father of two small boys, far off in Egypt. ‘I wonder how you would care for life out here?’ he wrote, intending speculation but absent-mindedly posing a question ...”

“... the superior authenticity of the voice on the spot, but the overall picture you get is a blur of close-ups. Juliet Gardiner had written very well on social conditions in wartime Britain, and on the changes brought about in the country by the huge scale of the American occupation. I remember American cities, lavishly equipped for the GIs’ comfort and ...”

“... little essays are an admirable reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name too ...”