“... out for a couple hours … sort of like going to Central Park’.I thought of Joe when I read about Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ...”

“... was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor and Freddie Sayers joined as executive editor (he is now editor-in-chief and ...”

“... a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American ...”

“... size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with ...”

“... greater fervour. Because he took the phrase as his own, these developments are associated with Donald Trump. But others saw this coming a decade before he became president. During the George W. Bush administration, the senior US journalist Ron Suskind encountered a White House official who admonished him for living in what he called the ‘reality-based ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... writings entitled The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, but – full disclosure – I omitted to read the work under review.)Looking at those writings now, I would say it was beyond dispute that Johnson has turned out to be the most influential satirist of his generation. People who complain that there’s no right-wing satire in this country should forget ...”

“... to London, Magee played Mr Slocum in that same first production of All That Fall, directed by Donald McWhinnie, in which Jack MacGowran had taken part. It was hearing this voice faintly in France through the ether as broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957 – reading an extract from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work, also directed by ...”

“... provides testimony which brings out its susceptibility to romantic and dualistic interpretation. Donald Davie has written lately in this journal: ‘Great poetry is greatly sane, greatly lucid; and insanity is as much a calamity for poets and for poetry as for other human beings and other sorts of human business.’ These are impressive words. But of course ...”

“... of him, because he threatens them, and they know what they gave him.’ Mr Karimi had seen Donald Rumsfeld on television a few days before, demonising Saddam. ‘It was different in 1983,’ he said. ‘That was when Rumsfeld went to Baghdad and told Saddam that President Reagan wanted to strengthen military, technical and commercial ties.’ Later ...”

“... songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall read the perfect ways of honour,And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.It isn’t clear that these lines were intended as a wholehearted endorsement of nostalgia for the old queen and her times. Only a decade after her funeral, there may have been as ...”

“... free, male and female within families – is the most unified of the slice books. It could well be read beside The Fatal Shore, complementing Robert Hughes’s information on convict life, extending the colonial landscapes, and importantly correcting Hughes’s simplistic view of the Aborigines.* When everything has been said about the ordeals of the ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... avant-garde. Fuzzy political gestures lacking any real slog or engagement. Buzzword slogans that read like Mao Zedong subbed by Patience Strong. Many of the artworld ideas Ono traded in (or on) were secondhand, watered down, and very much reliant on the ossified gallery system for any spark they did generate. Whereas the Beatles stood on stage and made ...”

“... mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock’. How far this prudishness in the public culture was mirrored in private life is hard to gauge, but Kynaston presents enough evidence ...”