“... 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 ...”

“... she didn’t like to say, but she told a former teacher she’d got the idea from his folklore class; to someone else she remarked that ‘of course’ the story was ‘about the Jews’; and to others she said it wasn’t fiction at all, but ‘simply North Bennington’, the Vermont town in which she lived, and the people there, ‘the way they slaughter ...”

“... of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for ...”

“... connection made in Britain. Inevitably we are told that this is to assist in the so-called ‘war against paedophiles, drug traffickers and organised criminal gangs’. But reciting the mantra of evil ones is not enough to justify the powers desired. No doubt the planners of this legislation are entirely confident that whatever limited niche they allot ...”

“... as a source of cash. For a taste of the discomforts attaching to his position, sample the brutal class scorn directed against him by the Earl of Rochester after they had fallen out in the mid-1670s: ‘He is a Rarity which I cannot but be fond of, as one would be of a Hog that could fiddle, or a singing Owl.’ Various of his relations and acquaintances were ...”

“... organising for themselves be absorbed into the Labour Party, which he saw as too preoccupied with class and economic inequality. He also wanted to devolve economic power by means of industrial democracy and workers’ control, on a model pioneered in 1976 by the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine Committee, which had formed to contest job cuts but ended by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... victories, and with his mixture of uncertainty and good principle submerged his kingdom in civil war. As a result, Shakespeare’s own sense of history is always, and increasingly, circular, individual and ironic. It says that nothing is final: it says that – as the subtitle of Henry VIII would finally have it – ‘All is true.’It is commonly agreed ...”

“... such as B’tselem, for publicly documenting the number of civilian casualties in the war against Gaza. Perhaps Kafka might be instrumentalised to overcome the loss of standing that Israel has suffered by virtue of its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian land. It matters that Israel comes to own the work, but also that the work is housed ...”