“... year later, she was, it seemed, a walking advertisement for herself, dressed ‘in every shade of green from the palest lichen to the fullest summer foliage – a lizard trimmed with beetles’. Anna, Comtesse de Brémont, in Oscar Wilde and His Mother, published in 1911, remembered ‘her arrayed in draperies after the medieval style, or cerise and black ...”

“... therapies and conspiracy theories about medicine and vaccination. Like his populist counterpart Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, and many MAGA influencers, Georgescu benefited from the pandemic, using people’s fear, uncertainty and ignorance to braid together an anti-establishment and anti-vax message, thus strengthening each strand: the ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

“... emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public lavatories, and further out, at Wimbledon Common (‘exactly five miles from the bright lights of Piccadilly’), where in 1963 a reporter from the News of the World, high on ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”

“... its medieval layout. It’s not hard to notice the absence at the heart of the town, a great green open space once occupied by a massive Benedictine abbey. Little of it is left: the remains of two monumental entrance gates plus a lofty detached bell tower, the latter dwarfing the two parish churches that once respectfully flanked an abbey church as large ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”

“... the entire country. Based on research completed in August 1994 in 41 of the 145 Rwandan communes, Robert Gersony, a UNHCR consultant, estimated that ‘between 25,000 and 40,000 persons’ were killed during the first 100 days of RPF rule. The Gersony report – in fact just briefing notes – was leaked to the press. Under intense pressure from Kigali and ...”

“... but his poems were used during the war in which such witnessings acquired unprecedented authority. Robert Lowell’s remark that it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme is one of the more complicated signposts in Housman country. His youngest brother, Herbert, was killed in action in 1901, and his nephew Clement Symons in Flanders in 1915. He wrote in 1933 ...”

“... to forget. A rash of articles erupted, explaining how different they really were: Vietnam hot and green, Afghanistan cold and arid, the Taliban had no nearby sanctuary like China or North Vietnam, militant Islam lacks the patriotic strand in revolutionary Marxism, and so on. That Vietnam ended long ago does not explain these hasty disclaimers: World War ...”

“... Or: ‘The floor of the chancel is set with encaustic tiles with designs in red, brown, pale green, white and rich Wedgwood blue.’ Mass was said in this sumptuous building in 1846 and work continued on the cathedral for the next few years.It seems incongruous now, barely possible that this wealth of detail was being incorporated into an Irish Catholic ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”

“... is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this Wednesday morning and more guides than there are people to show round. See the line of Frosterley marble inset in the floor of the nave, the limit beyond which women were not allowed to approach ...”

“... to write at fifteen:From varied scants of spring-waked life,Of rain-blown freshness, new-formed green,And hungry patter, woodland scene,Slides forth the subtle serpent lean,With wake of silence, writhing sheen,To edge of trees, to end of strife.At Yale he asked his parents to have his name taken out of the Social Register (they ignored the request, to his ...”

“... post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages along with ...”