“... of it all is not recorded. Perhaps she was lying down. The women in the Larkin household always took second place, which, in Motion’s view, is half the trouble. Kitty, Larkin’s older sister (‘the one person in the world I am confident I am superior to’), scarcely figures at all. Hers would, I imagine, be a dissenting voice, more brunt-bearing than ...”

“... but one of Hassan’s spiritual protégés, a local nationalist called Douglas Moore, took up his cause in the mid-1970s on the city council. Long controlled by racist Southern Democrats, DC won the right to elect its own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... Dwight Macdonald recalled. He was simply, bathetically, Delmore. Schwartz once conceded to John Berryman that ‘Delmorean’ would be the word used should his ‘verse prove attractive to posterity’. Posterity has not proved kind, something Ben Mazer’s edition of Schwartz’s Collected Poems sets out to redress. But this sprawling volume is no ...”

“... for anything I’ve ever done,’ he told an interviewer in 2019. Even the idea of making films took him by surprise. One evening in 1967, he was working in his studio at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he found himself imagining the wind wafting through one of his canvases: ‘Oh, a moving painting.’When Lynch died earlier this year, aged ...”

“... Ronald Reagan. He coined the term ‘Reagan Democrats’ to describe them. These people, he found, took Democrats’ calls for social justice as a coded pledge to siphon off their earnings to African Americans. When Barack Obama won Macomb in 2008, Greenberg wrote an op-ed for the New York Times under the heading ‘Goodbye, Reagan Democrats’. Then Trump won ...”

“... 1743, Anna Letitia Aikin was the product of a distinguished Unitarian background, the daughter of John Aikin, a revered teacher at the Warrington Academy. The academy was effectively the leading university for those dissenters who had enough money to get an education but who were forbidden by law to take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. Although, like all such ...”

“... Middlemarch, this ‘line of work is very deep indeed’.Few are better suited to this work than John Guillory, the deep man’s deep man. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published in 1993, is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of his work has been to engage ...”

“... to write directly about paintings if they do not care about them too much. Nothing in the mass of John Koethe’s verse and philosophical prose, for instance, suggests that paintings haunted him continually in anything like the way they did Herbert. (If I do him an injustice, I apologise.) But this seems to have meant that when he spent an hour or two with ...”

“... follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter ...”

“... For some in the audience, this was more than enough. ‘That means nigger citizenship,’ John Wilkes Booth told his companions. Three nights later, he followed the president to Ford’s Theatre and shot him in the head. On the morning of 11 April, Lincoln met privately with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. The subject of the meeting went ...”

“... a penchant for the resounding statement that hypes its own grandeur to the skies. He also took from him intellectual priorities: a cultural omnivorousness combined with a determination to make his own idiosyncratic identity the centre of all identities. He brought in his own extraordinary range of reading, a feisty resistance to the world around ...”

“... and a solid track record. Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”