“... fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.   In fiction’s grip we may mortgage our homes, sell our children, to have whatever it is we crave. Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean we may simply float away from our heart’s desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem ...”

“... partcomposed of vitreous ash, silica,ferrous oak gall,resentment, griefs, squabbles and squallsit may yet enthrallthe plane’s state-of-the-artcombustion chamber, clogging the engine with molten glassthe way a poem may yet stop the heart.One vanishing plume, or pall of dust, leads to another dust scrawl, and then to ...”

“... the constitution should be replaced. In the vote last year, 78 per cent said it should be. This May, an election was held to select the members of the Constitutional Convention, which is tasked with writing a new one. More than three-quarters of the seats were won either by the organised left or by pro-reform independents, and the assembly is the first of ...”

“... plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn’t do too much damage.’ He’s ...”

“... an individual or group to accumulate intellectual value or capital, much less trade on it. This may sound – and it obviously is – cack-handed and incompetent, but something of the same logic is at work in the short-termism that is currently remaking the academic workforce. Many university departments simply could not function without the energy, talent ...”

“... Kuchmar, who was then the president, came several times each summer to the south coast. Every May the entire route from Simferopol airport to his house in Yalta was paved afresh. No other road was ever touched. The Crimeans, who had lived in one of the richest and best-served regions under Soviet rule, felt they were neglected and discriminated against by ...”

“... wrote about how contact with the earth was ‘operative as an elixir’. Atlas, Antaeus says,. . . may well throw me and renew my birthBut let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,My elevation, my fall.Antaeus lost his strength in elevation and was weakened in ascent. In Electric Light there is a lot of air and flight and ‘lift’; in fact, it is as if the ...”

“... be). One of the things you might have to discover is that some virtues are against the grain: it may not feel real to you to say sorry, or to be grateful, for example.The upshot of all this is that adults who look after adolescents have both to want them to behave badly, and to try and stop them; and to be able to do this the adults have to enjoy having ...”

“... The apocryphal reporter who first used the word in connection with Hrabal’s fall may merely have been insinuating that he didn’t think much of men who feed pigeons, though we might suspect he was more pointedly flagging up the (apparently) unverifiable cause of the writer’s death, which looks rather like suicide. Hill’s poems are ...”

“... detail, by Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, at a press conference on 1 May. Toward the end of her 16-minute speech, Mosby, a 35-year-old African-American woman, did the unthinkable: she charged six police officers with crimes ranging from murder to involuntary manslaughter. She promised justice to Gray’s parents and pleaded for ...”

“... was not evil, since his monstrous acts were performed for a purpose, whatever sadistic relish he may have reaped from them. This is not to let him off the hook. Wiping out millions of individuals for a twisted political end, as Hitler, Stalin and Mao did, is a lot worse than what the Moors murderers got up to, simply on numerical grounds, even if the Moors ...”

“... out its interrogations of suspected communists. Quite a few people were living with fear. This may have included the women who were leading us in the group singalongs. Our third-grade teacher offered up alternative versions of what was in our history textbooks, which described the Indians, as they were called then, as bloodthirsty savages who lived in ...”

“... film all work for or are users of Pause, an organisation for mothers whose children have been (or may yet be) removed from their care. We see them – the social workers, mothers and Cammock herself – taking part in a singing workshop that culminates in a co-written song. The camera seeks out backgrounds and fragments, drawn to hands and feet instead of ...”

“... the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – DNR and LNR, in the Russian acronyms – may be the first step in a plan to absorb these provinces into Russia, cleaning up the Bolsheviks’ historical ‘mistake’. (This, incidentally, should put paid to the idea that Putin is bent on reconstituting the USSR: on the contrary, he claims that the ...”

“... having put my hand to the plough I invariably look back.’ Or: ‘Every Sunday morning you may think of Morris and me together – he reads a book to me and I make drawings for a big Virgil he is writing – it is to be wonderful and put an end to printing.’ In the V&A you can stand looking at a gold page from the Aeneid with Dowson directly as ...”