“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter Simple’, and he was pleased to see in Hill’s austere lyricism a salutary rejection of vulgar modern mores, so I am not sure what he would have made of ‘Cute, my arse’ – not to mention, from later sections of the poem, ‘a shot of jism’, ‘a ...”

“... Nureyev in the middle, until the French shouted: ‘Ah non! Ne le touchez pas – nous sommes en France.’ He was immediately engaged by the Marquis de Cuevas company and was back on stage in a week, giving another sensational performance as the prince in Sleeping Beauty in a theatre surrounded by police cars and the world’s press. He took at least 24 ...”

“... What’s more, the conflict is spreading to America’s allies, including Australia, Canada, France and the UK.It is hard to escape the impression that we have reached a point of historic rupture, and that is the feeling conveyed by this recent crop of books on Sino-American tensions. Not only do they offer a chronicle of mounting tension but, though ...”

“... China and the US. In the early 1990s, Beijing sent officials to be trained in Singapore, but Peter Sloterdijk’s line that statues of Mao will one day be replaced with ones of LKY now seems a dated exuberance. The meritocratic ideology of Singapore has begun to show signs of wear, and its elite seems incapable of regenerating itself as that of the PRC ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach. As Peter Beinart wrote in 2010, the Jewish establishment asked American Jews to ‘check their liberalism at Zionism’s door’, only to find that ‘many young Jews had checked their Zionism instead.’The conflict that Beinart described is an old one. In ...”

“... workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was 23 per cent in 1950 and 3 per cent in 2019. So much has changed in the last few decades. ‘The EU,’ Joyce writes, ‘lost 37 per cent of its farms between 2005 and 2020, almost all of which were tiny ...”

“... diplomatic initiatives were planned, including a UN conference on a Palestinian state chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. Then came Israel’s attack on Iran. ‘In the blink of an eye,’ Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian analyst based in Copenhagen, told me, ‘all of it was cancelled. My email was flooded with announcements of events that had been called ...”

“... He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties. Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany which Mann had had with his brother ...”

“... what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s ...”

“... hope to that saving possibility and not hold out against the occupying forces. His biographer, Peter Dodge, traces all the tortuous visions and revisions that led up to this ultimate misjudgment. He sees Hendrik de Man as a tragic figure, forced into exile (and convicted of treason in his absence), not so much through opportunism, compromise or worse, as ...”

“... savage reductions in jobs and welfare and a climate of job insecurity and social demoralisation. France, Germany and the rest of the EU nations are, after all, straining mightily to reach the Maastricht target of a 3 per cent budget deficit. If that is difficult for G7 states it is going to be tough indeed for South Africa, where there is less fat to ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”