“... After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention ...”

“... becoming a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to ...”

“... to her daily when she was in her eighties. By turns guilty and grumbling (‘a perpetual burning bush of fury in my chest’), Larkin’s attitude towards her doesn’t seem particularly unusual, though his dutifulness does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good ...”

“... legtimates attempts to pierce that secrecy. Pincher has been going round and round this mulberry bush for forty years now, with considerable commercial success. Pincher’s latest offering is at least as awful as the rest. As a literary construction it is a mess, rambling endlessly and repetitively around the same warmed-over material which he has already ...”

“... eyes lived as brown nightingales’. Her hair was a ‘lignous’ coiled black, like a ‘combed bush’. De Acosta boasted that she could steal any woman from any man. Garbo, who allowed herself to be briefly seduced then struggled for twenty years to extricate herself from de Acosta’s succubus clutches, called her ‘Miss Black and White’; a cynical ...”

“... a majority, was there any question even of self-government. The outlook at Whitehall remained: we hold what we have. If public justification was needed, Eden would provide one that was crude enough: ‘No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as ...”

“... like Pushkin’s, to maintain the law of sound imagining. The law, if it held, would state that we are diseased    When the moral will Intervenes to sap the heart, When the difficult feelings are Titillated and confused For novel combinations, or Ransacked for virtue. To be specific: As Byron said of Keats, ‘I don’t mean he is indecent, but ...”

“... was run by Fisk mean girls. She called them ‘dicty’. The NACW’s motto was ‘lifting as we climb’. Larsen wasn’t interested in slogans like that, or in ‘good Negroes’. Her books weren’t ‘of the propaganda type,’ she told Alfred Knopf, who published both of them. She wrote about the class she married into, and her novels struggle with ...”

“... enabled individuals to draw on the state’s coercive power to settle private grievances. When we think of denunciation in a totalitarian context, we think of secret police, of ideologies exalting loyalty to the state or party, of zero tolerance of dissent, and the possibility of appalling outcomes – death or ...”

“... else. The manufacture and dissemination of global ethics is a neglected strand of globalisation. We are all familiar with the core values embodied in human rights, democracy, ‘civil society’ and ‘governance’ – an aseptic word that seems to mean government minus politics. We also know the core institutions: the ...”

“... lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came and took me out of my bed last night and we went for a long walk in McGavin Park and he kissed me in the carpark but I didn’t let him go all the way, not like that Morag McGregor in 104 who does it with anyone. Dear Fiona, I wasn’t going to tell you this, but David borrowed some of my Toyah ...”

“... The world​ needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ...”

“... The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve got,’ he sang on the album’s opening number. Nobody in 1972, least of all Bowie himself, could have predicted where he would be in five years’ time, let alone forty. Yet Bowie’s towering and contradictory status, as both the most derivative and ...”

“... a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of ...”

“... with lower-case letters at the beginning of lines, might have been no more than what Stefan George, who employed such devices wholesale, was later to call barbed wire against the uninitiated (‘Stacheldraht wider Unberufene’). But the archaic language had the more destructively alienating effect of sounding poetic while concealing meaning ...”