“... Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was three years since ‘Space Oddity’ had made it into the top ten after being used by the BBC in its broadcast of the Apollo 11 ...”

“... Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling and its conclusions stark in their ...”

“... yet have a particular meaning. For some reason not yet clear to me, I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan ...”

“... an editorial/reviewing slot, ‘Le Salon de lecture’, where he wrote about La Conspiration by Paul Nizan, and two works of fiction – La Nausée and Le Mur – by Sartre. The pieces on Nizan and Sartre are often quoted, unlike his review of La Pasionaria’s speeches and writings (not ‘a great book’ despite the ‘unforgettable’ voice of a ‘lucid ...”

“... to follow, exactly two weeks later. Explosions seemingly orchestrated by Newton’s compasses: north, south, east, west. Contemplated in this setting, alongside Gormley’s Planets, the numerology was disturbing. The original expedition, recording the names of dead railwaymen, the erasures, was a hallucination, a sleepwalker’s fugue in the lull before ...”

“... in the town in 1946. I knew some of these people: Dan Bolger, for example, whose grandfather, Paul, had donated money in 1846. Dan Bolger had a shop in the town. It was hard to think of him, or any of these people, having grandparents who knew ‘bitter hunger, starvation and death’. Most of them had inherited property and exuded a certain ...”

“... relief package: Surrey gets a vastly bigger pay-off than Teesside. Misery is concentrated. In the North-East, the poorest region in England, nearly a billion pounds has been sucked out of the economy since 2010. Middlesbrough – described as an ‘infant Hercules’ by Gladstone in 1862 – has its bright future long behind it. The council has the highest ...”

“... the common disaster of the Second World War, when every nation-state between the Pyrenees and the North Sea was shattered by defeat and occupation. From the depths of impotence and discredit into which pre-war institutions had fallen, a quite new kind of structure had to be built up after peace returned. The post-war states of Western Europe were ...”

“... by no means always been the case. Fifty-odd million years ago, not only was there no ice at the North Pole, the temperature there was 23ºC. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last cool snap of this current ice age – known as a ‘glacial’, to distinguish it from the warmer ‘interglacial’ of the type we are living through now – much of ...”

“... out of the crisis in the teaching of Jesus, an ecstatic who believed in his own divinity, which Paul could transform into a faith beyond Judaism, no longer defined by the relation between God and his people, but God and the individual: a religion in which not observance of the Law, but love of the Almighty was the sole commandment. In China, during the only ...”

“... that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ‘seemed almost like a ...”

“... 15 apaches and found they were covered in tattoos – among them, images of the Boer leader, Paul Kruger. Apaches, as Luc Sante explains in The Other Paris, were propelled to fame by imaginative fin-de-siècle journalists and pamphleteers who felt the city was at risk from ‘an army of crime’. The cause of the arrests, and the sudden celebrity of the ...”

“... in pain. Even with a brief book, I was coming up about 40,000 words short. I asked to review Paul Chaloner’s lively and informative This Is Esports because I’d been brooding on these questions during lockdown.* My idea was that by thinking about the emerging field of digital sports, I’d find an interesting story and also clarify my thinking about ...”

“... she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out existential crisis: the one currently being endured by the Labour Party.What makes Jeremy Corbyn a complex political figure, rather in spite of himself, is that he is both too ...”

“... Black liberation made its world-historical debut in August 1791 when ten thousand slaves in the north of Saint-Domingue rose up and laid waste to sugar plantations. Within three months, the numbers involved in the insurrection had grown eightfold. Sugar production almost ceased. Fortunes burned. Planters fled, and some were killed. By 1794, the rebels had ...”