“... including Burkina Faso’s interim president, Ibrahim Traoré, who has modelled himself on Thomas Sankara – have become beacons of Pan-African resistance. And France’s efforts to destabilise these new regimes by mobilising Ecowas to impose sanctions or threaten invasion have come to nothing. Removing French and US troops or denying mining ...”

“... cast off for Istanbul. Robin made his way south through Bulgaria, which was about to join the Axis powers, and in a matter of days he and Micheline were reunited.Inever saw​ Granny Helen smoke, though I do know that during the war she carried a full cigarette case, as a strategy. I remember only in outline the story my father told me of these cigarettes, the ...”

“... than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, as he moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair ...”

“... in Creativity’, sounds stern, but the case histories it describes are those of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann and Giacometti. If those are the angry actors, where’s the harm in joining their gang? As the article explains, ‘whether attempts at channelling aggression are successful or not depends largely on the ability of the ego to tolerate ...”

“... says, describe ‘the actual creative process at work’. After all, most of us have rather weak powers of imaginative projection. ‘It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully,’ Elaine Scarry writes, ‘what is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost.’ As Woolf pointed out, Charlotte’s ghosts seem ...”

“... as Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump. She still sits on the town council, a body with few powers; it has also fallen to Reform. She told me how horrified she’d been during the last campaign at the hostility provoked by the mere mention of Keir Starmer’s name, or the sight of a Labour rosette.‘It was shocking in a few months how things have ...”

“... person yet,’ he said. ‘It will be the book you can write now.’ He wanted his book to be like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. I noticed he tended to eat pretty much with his hands. People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands. He turned ...”

“... Three women sat talking on one of the sofas. The bookshelf was packed with novels, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Leon Uris’s Trinity, The Fall of the House of Usher. We could hear cars and lorries whooshing over our heads on the Westway. ‘One woman from the tower,’ Bev said, ‘it had taken her nearly fifty years to get to where she was just before the ...”