“... around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was barely noticed amid the British MAGA wannabes eagerly partaking of the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. Simion himself paid tribute to Kirk in his brief speech. He marched onto the temporary stage on Whitehall wearing a ...”

“... individual class membership, but rather to explain why collective action and social conflict took the forms they did. Next, however, there has been a frontal attack on his use of class as the key factor for understanding social conflict. Dahrendorf and others have argued that class, being based on property, is less fundamental than power for the ...”

“... for future projects: Red Shift, a publishing imprint, after the Alan Garner novel; an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American ...”

“... good goal ruled out for offside). His successes within Portugal were not just luck, however: he took a poor team and turned them within a matter of months into the dominant force in Portuguese football, bringing in new players, changing the side’s tactics and insisting on discipline. He revealed himself to be ruthless, shrewd and highly ...”

“... When Alexander saw him, fat and huge and coarse-faced (for he was dark in colour, too), he took an instant dislike to him, hating him both for the way he had plotted and the way he looked. He ordered them to thread his feet with a bronze bit and drag him around in a circle, naked. Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the ...”

“... with respect to the British Bomb was closely held. The key players were Churchill, Lindemann and John Anderson, a senior minister in the war cabinet. They were in turn dependent on the experts’ constantly changing, often conflicting views as to whether an atomic bomb was possible and, if so, what it would do and how it might be used, how much it would ...”

“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style of ...”

“... who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre (Jane ended up with St John Rivers), to the larger-than-life adoptive mother who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre? Then there’s the rhetorical preening of Winterson’s last paragraph, which affects to pass her mother the microphone. If this ...”

“... in the distance.’ But how else, Hardy said, laughing, could he have written it? (Lawrence, who took so much from Hardy, has ‘the dawn is wanly blueing’ in Sea and Sardinia.) It is one of the signal pleasures of Claire Tomalin’s superb new biography that she has an eye for this kind of thing in Hardy, and quotes so well from him. We know a good critic ...”

“... similar. After a talk suggesting the end of the world was not nigh, a Jewish Angeleno came up, took me to one side, and burst into a confession of how fearful he felt about Armageddon. Though born in the US, and with no direct link to old Vienna, he was unmoved by the high-profile alliance between US and Israeli foreign policy – was this not an ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... to stop jostling for advantage and to start brooding on revenge. ‘Victories and defeats,’ as John Stoessinger put it, summarising Kissinger’s thinking, ‘merely lead to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could lead to stability.’ Talk of national honour was a useful holding device, because honour could never be satisfied: it ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... separated from the southern Catholic Netherlands, still governed by Spain, first in the person of John of Austria. By the end of the century, the ever more numerous Dutch soldiers came to be quartered in northern towns and villages, and it was their prerogative to plunder the countryside. A squad under an officer might emerge from town to waylay a rich convoy ...”