“... unliterary, Cooper ‘disliked writing even a letter’, or so family legend has it. He’d spent his twenties as a midshipman in the navy, though to his chagrin he never saw action, and as a gentleman farmer, first on land bequeathed him by his father on the shores of Lake Otsego in upstate New York; and then on a 42-acre property in Scarsdale that ...”

“... subtext: Giorgio Armani is reportedly giving the Guggenheim $15 million for various projects. Do the clothes of a living designer warrant this aesthetic shrine? Is the exhibition a crass promotion for the Armani empire? (‘Life is promotion,’ the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, has cheerfully noted.) Arranged by colour and genre rather than ...”

“... city of Nazareth officially surrenders to Israeli military forces on 16 July 1948. In the town hall, the Israeli commander reads out the bill of surrender to the gathered Arab-Palestinian notables. It’s in Hebrew and they don’t understand a word. The commander tells the mayor to sign the document, and then to join his soldiers for a ‘historic ...”

“... been assured in Havana that everything had been cleared with the Algerian government, that he’d be received with open arms and allowed to resume the political activities denied him in Cuba. But his handlers at the Cuban embassy in Algiers were now telling him the Algerians weren’t willing to offer him asylum.I’d ...”

“... on his bicycle, worked non-stop, and said that his métier was his greatest enjoyment. ‘I do everything, really, for myself,’ he wrote in 2002. The fact that no one owned him was beyond price: ‘Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty, freedom is the most expensive.’ Fashion Climbing is the story of his life before he was known as a ...”

“... It changes one or two structuring facts about the world as it is and asks: ‘What would humans do if this and this were true?’ The questions Le Guin asked were big, and her answers to them were subtle. Half a century ago she wondered: ‘What if people were gender-neutral most of the time, but changed between male and female at random when they came on ...”

“... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the ...”

“... 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to five years as a slipshod major, sitting in a dripping Nissen hut in Beaconsfield decoding German intelligence, with ...”

“... One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs ...”

“... If I walk down to the Bank of Ireland at the corner of Westland Row and Pearse Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost ...”

“... 1993, accompanied by his friend Duwayne Brooks. They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ‘What? What? Nigger!’ as the youths approached. From here on, there is no ...”

“... Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie Allan. I was working on a story about wild geese, which migrate from Greenland to Islay in their tens of thousands each year. They speckled the low-lying ...”

“... last year of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, a prominent Northern Irish victims’ group, David Hallawell, the son of a police officer killed by the IRA, said that ‘innocent victims and survivors have been betrayed and forgotten … for the sake of the government and votes on the mainland.’The main point of contention is that the offer of ...”

“... solar hat and khaki uniform that Beerbohm has Kipling wear in one of his caricatures were not yet de rigueur. There are early portraits depicting Englishmen with their Indian wives, dressed in a mish-mash of Persian and Hindu styles. In the first half of the 19th century, the Fort William College, later the Hindu College, saw teacher and ...”

“... only accepts readies: good, dirty, plague-carrying cash; folding paper portraits of folk you’d prefer to keep out of your pockets.When a couple of art sympathisers drifted in, they were sent off to a filling station on Grove Road to find coins. Back in the Sunday spread of Victoria Park, the original people’s park, where multicultural street fare ...”