“... sweet touches of childish humour that you almost forget how creepy it is for a 14-year-old girl to be singing a love letter to a moustachioed man more than twice her age.Apparently, Gable was so moved by her performance that he kissed her, at which Garland burst into tears (Mickey Rooney, her teenage co-star and classmate in ...”

“... sympathetic biographer, Edward Luce. He slept on hard floors to feel the discomfort experienced by the less fortunate. In his high school yearbook photo, ‘the eye is drawn to his hawklike nose and piercing gaze,’ Luce writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language ...”

“... I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of ...”

“... minority.Many attempts have been made to explain relativity to non-scientists, among them several by Einstein himself, beginning with Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916, first published in English in 1920). It is still in print today, though despite having had so many readers it has not succeeded in persuading the general public to abandon ...”

“... to take some photographs outside recently, a man with a lanyard told us to stop. He wouldn’t be drawn on his employer: ‘It’s just a tech company.’ Two independent sources who have attended meetings there with senior Palantir staff in the last two years told us they had to sign non-disclosure agreements just to enter the building.Such wariness may ...”

“... portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these ...”

“... art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) … ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so ...”

“... Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con debate, however, McGurl also sets out to defend the creative writing programme from its detractors, assuming the rhetorical burden of proving that ...”

“... and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika ...”

“... long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed to, but other than that really, unless I’ve got a couple of days off together, I do feel I’ve lost a ...”

“... walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to help, then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed joint executors after Arendt suffered a second heart attack and died in her Riverside Drive apartment.‘The Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed ...”

“... Once​ upon a time, the distribution of power and privilege was determined by birth. Now, it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate ...”

“... was tuppence-halfpenny an hour. Sherard described it as a ‘terribly ugly and depressing town’.By the time my father arrived in 1938, it had grown even more ugly and rundown during the Great Depression. Mechanisation had all but killed manual chain-making, and most of the coal pits had fallen into disuse. Unemployment figures were so high, even in that era ...”

“... a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned West German mail. Such treatment, it might be argued, is not without all justice. For in a comparative perspective, did not the English Civil War – however traumatic at the time – prove in the end to be the least significant of the political upheavals that ushered ...”

“... the assertion of this difference would have been superfluous, but in many circles it has come to be an article of faith that the idea of a distinctively literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to ...”