“... for a short while. Álvaro de Campos was two years younger than Pessoa and slightly taller. He may have been Jewish. He was a dandy who drank absinthe and smoked opium. In an early poem he expressed a desire to ‘eat the universe’, but as he grew older he became more melancholy (‘it would have been better not to be born,/For no matter how interesting ...”

“... Wyatt’s father is a scholar whose sermons are as likely to mention Mithras as Christ. His Aunt May performs killjoy Puritanism as if it were an Olympic sport: she even hangs up male and female laundry to dry separately. When Reverend Gwyon takes on simple-minded Janet as a kitchen maid, the household is able to match the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm ...”

“... to appear, and in his papers there is the larger part of a manuscript for the 16th volume. It may perhaps be edited by Carr’s friend, Tamara Deutscher, with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus ...”

“... her tastes: her favourite author was Kipling; her second son was named after Kim. ‘“Pukka” may seem an old-fashioned, colonial word to use, but that’s how she came across,’ the Oxford academic Peter Carey, another friend, told Wintle. ‘One noticed how, every year, she was the first to get her Christmas cards out.’ But she was kind, gracious and ...”

“... as uneasy bachelors than fathers or husbands. All three, indeed, if this is any of our business, may have died virgins. One of them took the view that ‘I have no ambitions and no desires. To be a poet is not my ambition, it’s my way of being alone.’ The cities in which they were alone were Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Dublin. The writers were Fernando ...”

“... in the 1930s. Any reflection on the strange career of this form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose ...”

“... come high water. Superstorm Sandy arrived a week before the vote, a natural disaster that may have helped rescue Obama politically by reminding people on the East Coast that a federal government is sometimes a useful thing to have. The advent of postal voting means that the day itself is not quite as special as it once was, but it remains the focus of ...”

“... bets they didn’t understand. HBOS was almost entirely a traditional retail bank. ‘Whatever may explain the problems of other banks, the downfall of HBOS was not the result of cultural contamination by investment banking. This was a traditional bank failure pure and simple. It was a case of a bank pursuing traditional banking activities and pursuing ...”

“... Richardson, and he sang David’s praises. ‘He’s the ideal playwright. Never says a word.’5 May. Angels in America opens at the National. When I saw the original production at the Cottesloe in 1992 I found I was sitting behind Derek Jarman. I knew Derek slightly since he had been in the adaptation of Orton’s Prick Up Your Ears, and I knew, too, that ...”

“... would become Israel’s prime minister and withdraw the last Israeli troops from Lebanon in May 2000. On the morning after the April 1973 killings, the Lebanese lined up for and against the Palestinians. Sunni Muslims demanded that the Palestinians be allowed to defend themselves, to conduct a commando war against Israel from Lebanon and to maintain an ...”

“... of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them. Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been ...”

“... armed forces,’ he said in mid-January. ‘If things go on as they are, Ukrainian statehood may be dealt an unendurable, very serious blow.’ In his recent interview with the Trumpist American journalist and conspiracist Tucker Carlson, Putin conspicuously failed to answer when asked several times if he was satisfied with the Ukrainian territory Russia ...”

“... Warren, ‘discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review’. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real document is already written: her diaries, a biography of aim. In her Journals she wished, with ...”

“... Stations of the Cross, where each episode is assigned the same pictorial weight, though pilgrims may linger longer in front of some than others.The true medium of this text is messages flying back and forth in tireless intercourse. The reader, like the characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand out for the scrap of ...”

“... efficiency – as people run to spend their suitcases of banknotes instead of working – and may even wreck the entire financial structure of a society. This being the worst manifestation of the devil, the ultimate Beelzebub, it is not surprising that in 1996, with inflation ultra-low at 1.5 per cent, the Bundesbank, when refusing to cut interest ...”