“... is melancholy to think that any village community should have rated the sacrifice of ardent young lives so low that it was held that their adequate commemoration was achieved by a cross of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such ...”

“... Hickey has even asserted that Rockwell could feel no ‘instinctive identification’ with the young black girl whom he painted for Look in 1964, as she was escorted into a newly desegregated school, and blames his friends Erik Erikson and Robert Coles for brainwashing him into an interest in poverty programmes and civil rights. In the same issue of the ...”

“... they would leave the investors holding the bag. Appropriately, the financial forensics analyst Andrew Weissmann was among the first appointments Mueller announced. In November, a police raid on the Deutsche Bank offices in Frankfurt looked like another piece of the puzzle – especially if one recalled Mueller’s subpoena of the bank a year ...”

“... novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be Proustian (Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance); the other was bilious and aspired to satire (Larry Kramer’s Faggots). I disliked them both, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that gay literary culture had room for two such opposite productions, could ...”

“... scholarly tasks of editing Milton and of compiling a student anthology of critical essays about Andrew Marvell, experiences that awoke him to the full horror of academic Lit Crit: ‘researching these two books made me resolve never to write such stuff myself, and to deride it whenever I came across it.’ Much of the introduction to the Marvell collection ...”

“... services, imposed from Whitehall.’ Two months later, the new health secretary, the Conservative Andrew Lansley, announced his plans for a top-down reconfiguration of England’s NHS services, imposed from Whitehall. The patient whom Porter was about to operate on was a 60-year-old woman from the Wirral with a complex prosthesis in one leg, running from her ...”

“... One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs ...”

“... launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance ...”

“... Guevara was more interested in medicine than in Peronist, or indeed continental, politics. As a young man, he apparently advised the maids in his parents’ house to vote for Perón on the grounds that his policies favoured their ‘social class’ – a formulation which suggests that Perón had little to offer the comfortably-off Guevara family. (Very ...”

“... grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV cameras on tripods and photographers jostling for position. Behind the cameras are two rows of seats, some are occupied by journalists, others by members of al-Muhajiroun. From ...”

“... to Aldermaston in 1955 so that Britain could build real megaton hydrogen bombs. A brilliant young theoretical physicist, he was already internationally famous for the ‘Ward Identity’, a basic theorem of quantum physics. Sakharov has described him as one of six ‘titans’ of modern physics for their contributions to quantum electrodynamics: three ...”

“... takes precedence over all more immediate goals; the belief that, in addition to preparing the young for future employment, the aim of developing analytical and creative human capacities is a worthwhile social purpose; the conviction that the existence of centres of disinterested inquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are ...”

“... Four years later, during rehearsals for a revival of the first production, one of von Bülow’s young assistants had a mental breakdown, apparently brought on by the opera, and was institutionalised. In 1911, Felix Mottl collapsed and died while conducting Tristan and Joseph Keilberth met the same end in 1968.We enjoy the stories about Tristan und Isolde ...”

“... might help prop him up in his doddering years.‘Philip had searched diligently for a beautiful young woman to see to him as Jane Eyre looked after old Mr Rochester,’ Benjamin Taylor writes in his memoir, Here We Are. ‘What he got instead was me.’ Taylor was young, goyish and gay, all of which Roth was not. ‘I ...”

“... 5 July. A tweet announced that the president had accepted Pruitt’s resignation. His replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal lobbyist who can be trusted to keep a lower profile; he has slowed the pace of Pruitt’s anti-regulatory innovations, and in some cases sent a programme back for reassessment. In the reign of Trump, this is what we are learning ...”