“... in sight. The provenance of figures like Robert Orr, head of ‘strategic planning’, lifted straight from the National Security Council in Washington, Louise Fréchette, deputy secretary-general, dispatched from the Defense Ministry in Ottawa, or, lower down the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and ...”

“... as a ‘burning’, a ‘sickness’, a ‘poison’, a ‘wound’ and an ‘arrow’ passing ‘straight into my innards’. These hints of physicality almost feel like something he’s failed to airbrush out of the story, but nothing in a Petrarch poem is there by mistake. He lets us see that the long aftermath of mournful idealising – the classic trope ...”

“... he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more ...”

“... forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would ...”

“... wrote after DiMaggio’s death in 1999, he bluntly declared: ‘No one should ever have hit in 56 straight games.’ What DiMaggio achieved, therefore, ‘ranks as pure heart, not the rare expectation of luck’. But this is, to say the least, an odd way of putting it. What the data reveal is that DiMaggio’s streak was much more unlikely than other unlikely ...”

“... skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d ...”

“... Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half black, half white; half young, half old; three-quarters ...”

“... They dig​ and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John ...”

“... no more than her slightly quivering shoulders and hand raised to her mouth. Mr Entwistle, ramrod-straight in a Sunday suit, looked more like a figure from the 1950s than from the 21st century, one of those withdrawn and stoical breadwinners who haunt period TV drama. He conjured the lace-curtain world of appearances kept up, stiff collars, the vegetable plot ...”

“... for the ATS, like, say, the Queen, who is six months younger than she is. Instead, she went straight to Oxford in 1943, where Conservative politics became a ‘focus’ for her life. So those childhood memories may well have included some guilt about the war. Had she joined the Forces, she might have escaped what one of her disenchanted ...”

“... is the first poem in the book, the Anglo-Saxon ‘Dream of the Rood’: which is printed in Michael Alexander’s translation, a translation whose excellence has the unavoidable flaw that by taking the poem so successfully out of its own language it removes some of its inherent astonishment. This is a poem written nearly a thousand years before ...”

“... it bored her. She had headaches and back pain, probably because of her scoliosis. Her first son, Michael, was born in 1943, and seemed always to be sick. She took mothering classes and subscribed to Parents magazine. She had another baby, Robert, took guitar lessons and saw a psychoanalyst, Saul Miller, three times a week. Decades ago, one of Ethel’s ...”

“... miles south of Padua. ‘Not marked by anything in particular/it was a masterpiece of averageness straight roads/ugly houses,’ a train stop at which Herbert never alighted. The poem, which builds characteristically from weakness to strength, ends by centring on the irreducible unknown lives that Herbert imagines, ‘a city where a man died yesterday someone ...”

“... by the FBI, it deepened the impression of an espionage implosion in the vicinity of Trump. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, pleaded guilty to the charge of lying to the FBI about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. His sentence was postponed by a DC district court in December (with a strong indication that ...”

“... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...”