“... Peter​ Thiel is known for so many different things it can be hard to keep up. He co-founded PayPal, which provided the basis for his early fortune as well as Elon Musk’s. He is the eerily prescient angel investor who helped launch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook on the path to global domination. He is the man who bankrupted Gawker, the online gossip site, by funding Hulk Hogan’s libel action, fulfilling a decade-long vendetta that started after Gawker outed Thiel as gay ...”

“... quote, something concrete. We use Hazlitt to advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly ...”

“... and all around me bindweed, bluebell, chamomile and coltsfoot, ferns uncurling like a thought, white butterflies around my shoulders.’ In Parrot’s writing thoughts uncurl like ferns, metaphors and similes exchanging meaning in an organic and effortless ebb and flow. This is how he describes the sinister and sadistic Lord Devon when he comes with his ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... were an Alice character, she would have the same problems as the others do with language and the White Queen does with hair pins. Here comes Alice’s entourage again – and again – to tell us that some things make nonsense, or at any rate make sense only to the teller and the story. And that, I’m afraid, we just have to put up with. The author’s note ...”

“... skull had subsequently been buried with the rest of Browne’s body in the Norwich church of St Peter Mancroft. There follows a disquisition on the life and work of Sir Thomas, a man close to Sebald’s heart, and his nearest precursor in cast of mind, lightly (if arcanely) learned and enormously curious, including the possibility or probability of his ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... loose with the dates and the references, claiming for example to have conducted an interview with Peter Lawford, the English actor and member of the rat pack, on a date some time after his death. Kelley is not just mean, or dangerous: she has a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favourite Oprah ...”

“... error in choosing to target Trump’s obvious character flaws as the reason to keep him out of the White House. It’s not as if those flaws were hidden. For his supporters they were already baked in: harping on them did nothing except make it sound like the Democrats were crying wolf. If this guy were as dangerous as they say, would he really be a serious ...”

“... is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a Wilson/Falkender joke. The ‘ecology’, according to ...”

“... where surf breaks like a plasterer ‘smoothing fresh cenotaphs’ and Sandpipers burst like white notes from a ceremonial band. Walcott has hot news from the Caribbean: ‘unrest’, ‘governments falling’, ‘junta and coup d’état, the newest Latino mood’. But he doesn’t find the changes heart-warming. The theme of ‘The Spoiler’s ...”

“... beneath the rifles which threaten them; or else it is a delightful young girl all in snowy white who dreams in the moonlight leaning on a broken column. I mean to say that most people see in a canvas only a subject which takes them by the throat or by the heart and they demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane ...”

“... singer Carol Grimes. To advertise the concert, RAR supporters spraypainted an image onto a plain white sheet, photographed it, and then reduced the image to a flier. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to include the time of the gig. Security was put on by the Royal Group of Docks Shop Stewards Committee. Widgery remembers the dockers arriving with a bulky ...”

“... bas relief of the Triumph of Pallas, topped with a statue of Glory, have been stripped down into a white square with four minimalist columns. This year it’s hung with heavy black shrouds drenched in oil by Oscar Murillo, fascistic and funereal, and in place of Pallas’ pediment is a neon by the American artist Glenn Ligon, faint in the bright ...”