“... published a few years later, describes four voyages to the New World – the first of which may well have been invented – along with such further tokens of barbarism as Amerindians’ indulgence in sweat lodges and eating without tablecloths. More was reprising a genre in which tall tales were commonplace. Utopia, like Mundus Novus, describes American ...”

“... a collection of thousands of eye-witness accounts covering five hundred years of performance. It may be taken either as an erudite coffee-table book or a major research tool, saving countless hours of fractured looking on the internet; either way, it is full of diverting detail. In 1707, Thomas Brown wrote that some of the singing men at St Paul’s ...”

“... you waving glow sticks. Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is ...”

“... who understand what it is to labour at a definition.Those who prefer research methods to be buried may find Ogilvie’s habit of making explicit her archival travails frustrating, but it’s fascinating watching her track the contributors down. Her narrative ends as she travels back to Australia to meet Chris Collier, who merits the ‘unsung hero’ epithet ...”

“... Life (which Heller-Roazen translated into English) designates this Roman figure as a man ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’, a man who is ‘sacred’ in the antithetical sense of the word largely lost to us – accursed, at the mercy of all.* For Agamben the condition of bare life was precisely an exception, even if it has sometimes threatened ...”

“... it’s primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Deprived of its traditional features, it may curve back on itself, taking itself as its own raison d’être in the manner of some modernist art; it is also free to serve as critique on a sizeable scale for the first time. The miseries of commodification are also an enthralling moment of ...”

“... second major setback was Binyamin Netanyahu’s victory against Shimon Peres in the elections of May 1996. Netanyahu was a sworn enemy of the Oslo Accords, viewing them as incompatible both with Israel’s security and with its historic right to the Biblical homeland. But he knew that two thirds of the Israeli public supported the Accords and the policy of ...”

“... the method and purpose of the Brecht we still see on the stage and the bookshelf, a Brecht who may be more profitably confronted when the fiftieth anniversary of his death comes up in seven years’ time.Of all the postwar moments that Brecht could have chosen to die, the summer of 1956 was probably the most piquant. In February Khrushchev had denounced ...”

“... called ‘too slow’. Somnolent, smeary, subatomic, the first couple of times you hear it you may wonder, as with my early morning news report, if it wasn’t just a dream. Russell was a one-man index of all the tempos modern music might use or try out. He played in rock bands. He wrote and played experimental modern classical music. He was an ...”

“... football clubs. Vinai Venkatesham, CEO of Arsenal until last year, isn’t included (though this may change now he has an OBE), nor is the club’s American owner. There was, however, an entry for the late Sir Chips Keswick, a former club chairman, educated at Eton, son-in-law of the earl of Dalhousie and a director of the Bank of England. Sometimes Who’s ...”

“... work, suggesting that the same judgments are not applied to choral writing. The real answer may be that, hard as this Magnificat is to sing, it has remained in the general repertory and not been dismissed along with the rest.But​ there is a long way to go with Stanford’s legacy. This many melodies cannot be judged quickly, and his sense of form ...”

“... unembarrassed commonsense – sometimes impressively spot-on, sometimes dumbly reductive. One may not want to give Shakespeare’s galleys to this man but at the same time it would be a pleasure to let him loose on X or Y.1. The sentence at a. differs in nature from sentence at b. In the a. sentence you are writing from the viewpoint of the Bloodgoods, in ...”

“... Pakistan, to his later global status as one of the half-dozen subversives whom unpolitical people may have heard of.You Can’t Please All, from its less dramatic title on, is a different kind of book. Twice the length, covering almost half a century, from the final years of the Cold War to the current era of less predictable disorder, it is partly about ...”

“... in the same way. But here at once is the problem. Damage to body or property can be assessed. It may be difficult to assess the real damage to a person who loses a leg, or in the ‘pain and suffering’ (a legal expression) of someone laid low, say, by asbestosis, but judges and lawyers can have a stab at it by reckoning, for instance, how many days’ work ...”

“... outside, who requires a far bank from which to grasp his own city’s substance. The morning river may be still and the figures on its foreshore few, small and faceless, yet there is a zeal to the gunky highlights that stud the sunlit roofs, a kind of staccato fury.I turn from these notes of mine to the actual sentences with which Vermeer was first commended ...”