“... of Canetti’s internationalism, even his ‘Englishness’, his Shakespearean side, gives the best intuition that a non-Germanist can get of Kraus’s peculiar genius. It is, above all, a genius of commitment – to language and to emotion. That was the same with Kafka. How to combine, in art, a pure, fastidious rigour with the simplest feeling of rage ...”

“... his fear that the toil of his career and his frustrated love for Maud Gonne have consumed his best years. Cuchulain, however, suspects that the Old Man is trying to scare him away, and the two begin to wrangle, as their successors would in Purgatory. While water splashes on the stones, the Old Man sleeps and the hero is lured away by the hawk. The play ...”

“... and kind nurse. Appalled by Keats’s physical wretchedness and psychic disintegration, he did his best, wearing himself out to keep Keats alive, even against Keats’s will, even against the pressure of his own exhaustion. ‘I have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the ...”

“... time I heard him speak was over lunch, when someone mentioned an article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof. What we needed to know, Page piped up, was that the New York Times was prejudiced against his boss. We really didn’t need him to come all the way from Russia to tell us that. The mystery was what he could possibly be doing on the Trump ...”

“... another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms ...”

“... a clear day and you could see for miles. From her flat on the 23rd floor, Rania texted one of her best friends from back home and they talked about facts. Who you love is a fact and the meals you cook are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets ...”

“... others, and aid donors with limited budgets wanted to know which to prioritise. The nutritionist Nicholas Haan and his colleagues at the UN’s food security and nutrition analysis unit in Somalia developed a five-phase scale with colour-coded maps to represent a composite of three kinds of data: on households’ access to food, child malnutrition levels and ...”

“... Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child ...”

“... high in early 2020. Markets were booming. He was confident of re-election, for which he thought it best to dispense with any policy platform at all. Those dreams were crushed by a crisis for which Trump was the least well suited of all recent presidents – a pandemic with obscure origins in China. He answered with erratic conspiracy theories and failed to ...”

“... fewer children.’ The piece discusses a widely cited paper by Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered ‘a broad range of individual lifestyle choices’ and came up with recommendations for four ‘high impact’ actions which had ‘the potential to contribute to systemic ...”

“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”

“... base of knowledge about the Ancient Puebloans (outdatedly referred to by Taylor as the Anasazi). Best of all, Peck loses his mind over a Blue Jay notebook that Lewis bought on a trip to Taos and Santa Fe with Cather in 1925, and in which the two women took turns writing. BLUE JAY, it proclaims on the cover, above a sprightly picture of the bird, and beneath ...”

“... an earlier age, in which, presumably, Americans regarded their enemies with amused courtliness at best and a chivalrous anger at worst. Gone from the record are the genocidal campaigns against native Americans, or the various interventions, from Central and South America to the Pacific, North Africa, Europe and Asia, pitting Americans against local enemies ...”

“... hard to cultivate since the end of the Troubles.Xenophobia: In December, the BBC correspondent Nicholas Watt talked to an unnamed ‘Tory grandee’ who insisted that ‘the Irish really should know their place’ when it came to Brexit. (‘You’d swear we created the problem,’ the taoiseach had complained in October.) On 16 December, Fergal Keane ...”

“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”