“... recorded the gist of ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ in Latin; the version that survives in Old English may well be a back translation. Even so, the semi-mythical cowherd became known as the first English poet and the father of English sacred song. His ‘Hymn’ has pride of place in anthologies of Old English poetry. For a while, anonymous biblical poems in Old ...”

“... Lives Matter, Covid-19 restrictions and most recently the Israel-Hamas war suggest this decade may be just as tumultuous. Yet many governments are restricting the right of assembly. The trend is unsurprising among authoritarians who have abandoned any pretence of toleration (think of Putin after the invasion of Ukraine or Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong ...”

“... are enacting their own struggles for existence, negotiating trucial boundaries that may be fraught and writhing or – as with the still life’s conjunction of green fruit, white cloth and blond wood – orthogonally peremptory. Such fights between greens and yellows are properly speaking fights for the viewer’s attention, colour being (as we ...”

“... fabrication. The tattered statues of Lud and his sons, most likely those from the Ludgate, may be seen today in the porch of St Dunstan-in-the-West, just off Fleet Street.)No respectable history of Roman Britain now begins with Brutus or Lud. No one takes the inventive word games (Brutus → Britain; Troia Nova → Trinovantes; Lud ...”

“... and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from Richard’s Viking forebears, who had a special word for such unfortunates: heimnar, ‘home-corpse’. But it isn’t clear that the Normans were more barbarous than anyone else in the early Middle Ages, and if they were, we can’t ...”

“... against the wet cobblestones’. Mrs S kneels and the matron catches her arm to steady her. It may be the first time they have touched. The novel is an accumulation of such scenes in escalating permutations, in the church, the corridor, the staffroom.At opposite ends of the social hierarchy, Mrs S (as wife to the headmaster) and the matron (as overseas ...”

“... from within.Dissent from outside Israel, meanwhile, has been toothless. Arab and European capitals may have been angry at Israel’s bombings in Gaza and condemned its policy of starvation, yet their concrete actions amounted to little more than very restricted sanctions. Trade and travel between Israel and Europe have continued freely, as has the flow of most ...”

“... pages but from a battered notebook, as if it was semi-private or still “in progress”.’ This may be so; on the other hand, Calder’s ‘as if’ may be the truth. There was certainly more than a single battered notebook: the one from which we read on that lurching train in the 1970s was full, with twenty-five years or ...”

“... this week. Perhaps he feels no guilt this minute; only relief at something to tell his chief. It may take years to find the verdict of his own mind, a reminiscent smile or an inner yell that attempts to recall the tiny deaf missile – escaping faster than ...”

“... block like a row of thoughts, tatty and predictable. In what passes for an age of confession, may what I bury stay hidden, for form’s sake.      * Then again the tubers do look a lot like old mens’ members, shrivelled in a tidy bloodless heap, like the spoils of some Biblical battle – gentile foreskins on the field of God’s ...”

“... ash mostly, hickory, oak; greying in the weather, by April starting to rot, outsides sodden by May, too crumbly even to splinter. But then to uncover the first layer; white birch, bright with the whiteness that whitens your hands like chalk; flesh-coloured wood still firm in its sheath of papery bands, flaw-lined like slubbed silk. Five months ... Our ...”

“... too deep therequest, too slippery theladdering of –what was the tongue –cold – arrowing – may it notbe English – if they inviteme back – some morninglike thisafter historyif they drag meback some morninglike this onethe massacre still hotin the fieldthe flashy glinting win again oflanguage overshriek call whine clickover growl chit cough bray ...”

“... The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe had already been leaked when Either/Or came out in May. Going on tour allowed me to meet readers twenty years younger than myself, to realise how much more clearly they see the hierarchies, how ready they are to dismantle them. The definition of ‘politics’ that I grew up with is not long for this world. The ...”

“... of Roland: the wise, steady friend standing up for the brilliant, wayward hero. The comparison may sound pretentious, but then Evans compares McEnroe to Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, with quotations from Shakespeare and from Peter Levi on Shakespeare. He uses adjectives like ‘pavonine’, and describes McEnroe’s style as pointilliste – rather a good ...”

“... between the direction of time and directions in space, Hawking reassures his readers, who may at this point have had some difficulty in following him, by saying that ‘as far as everyday quantum mechanics is concerned, we may regard our use of imaginary time and Euclidean space-time as merely a mathematical device ...”