“... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...”

“... room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open – lest I cry? Kleinzahler’s work has been praised for its ‘funky syntax’, but it is the delicacy and unobtrusiveness of the transitions achieved in these lines that seem to me crucial to many of his best effects: indeed, it is the ...”

“... tragedy. Denied the dignity of his tragic heroism, the noble Hamlet is a destructive force. In John Updike’s recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, Hamlet is still more unlovable. He is coldly manipulative, while his kingly father is reduced to a clumsy and egotistical bully. Updike is also engaged in an act of rehabilitation. But he turns his attention to ...”

“... shattering and glassy, all daggers and plans, while the woman in the wheelchair across the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where ...”

“... a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... passed through long corridors and many locked and relocked doors, I was ushered into a large hall containing about a hundred people … Many of the inhabitants underwent major brain operations, and consequently many were shaven-headed. Others were swathed in bandages and were disfigured by post-operative bruises and black eyes.The patients were dressed ...”

“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... Ballroom in Harlem, could be as perceptive in judging future talent, when it came their way, as John Hammond, the greatest of the talent scouts of the decade, though they ranged less widely. What the Left did was – deliberately and successfully – to bring black music out of the ghetto by mobilising that curious combination of radical Jews and ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... in that respect remains immutable – The people speak Chinese and look inscrutable. The Great Hall of the People is the venue For a fifteen-course State Banquet every night. There isn’t any need to read the menu: You take a pinch of everything in sight. It all tastes at least wonderful and when you Happen upon a dish that’s sheer delight Just go on ...”

“... sent to school and could not spell. It is all too easy to present him as Squire Booby of Booby Hall. Before going up to Oxford he had to be coached by a Mr Smith (later the Master of Balliol), while Mrs Smith endeavoured to enliven him by singing a comic song: ‘My jolly red nose, caused by gin, I suppose.’ Despite intensive coaching, he nearly failed ...”

“... of this is new. There has always been a ‘push and pull’, as he puts it, between COBA, City Hall, the federal courts, lawyers, activists, incarcerated people and public opinion. Shanahan was himself briefly detained on Rikers, in 2014, after taking part in a protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His book is an ...”

“... and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse James. Someone told me it was named for James because his people ...”