“... calming’. Others are baffling: Spotify distinguishes between ‘small room’, ‘big room’, ‘deep big room’ and ‘escape room’. It’s fun to imagine what these might sound like, but there’s no need: click on any of the names and an example of the genre plays.Browsing Every Noise at Once is a reminder of how ...”

“... ticks were taken away, they wouldn’t pay to get them back. ‘Fuck that, they should pay me,’ Stephen King tweeted. LeBron James told his 52 million followers that he wouldn’t be paying either. And if the lords didn’t have blue ticks, then the peasants didn’t want them either. Almost the only people who seemed willing to pay for them were either ...”

“... morn breaks on their quivering bed,Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun,And ocean isles so small, the dog-fish trackingA dead whale, who should find them, would swim thriceAround them, and fare onward – all to holdThe offspring of my brain. Nor these alone:Bronze labyrinth, palace, pyramid and crypt,Baths, galleries, courts, temples and ...”

“... up to a topic while naming it only by a metonym is telling – perhaps intended, too, as a small frowning courtesy to the three lady members of the fifteen-strong committee.Court cases are inevitably a key part of the record: often pitiful in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray ...”

“... huge for a far-right rally in the UK. But the once fringe ideas of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, have become mainstream for Reform and the Conservatives, and for populist right-wing movements around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was ...”

“... So, impressing this teacher became most important to me.He was trying to make you feel small but he ended up making you feel big.Absolutely. When I got fewer red marks than these other guys, the footballers, I began to think I was getting somewhere. This teacher – call him ‘P.J.’ – rarely praised anybody. Or if he did, he praised them at ...”

“... almost as though it were a simple matter of logic. Writing in this paper some months ago, Stephen Sedley considered the off-the-shelf solution of incorporation of the European Convention’ to head the list of possible reforms in this area ‘if only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an ...”

“... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist girlfriend, Litzi ...”

“... thought a good idea to get someone from the Trump campaign, given that in July 2016 there was a small but not insignificant chance he might end up as president. The person who turned up was Carter Page. None of the people I spoke to seemed entirely sure who he was or what he was doing there. He sat through two days of discussions about lobbying and ...”

“... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...”

“... by the week, his marriage in tatters. He finished a highly psychologised critical biography of Stephen Crane. He replaced Roethke for a term at the University of Washington in Seattle; lectured briefly at the University of Vermont; met Jarrell, without any fur flying. In 1952 he spent the spring term at the University of Cincinnati, a generally successful ...”

“... seven years earlier. They were an unsavoury bunch, who all had experience of committing fraud in small teams; Frizer, as if going down to posterity as the killer of a great Elizabethan playwright weren’t ignominy enough, had also been a property-speculator in Basingstoke. Of Marlowe’s recent biographers, only Constance Kuriyama is prepared to accept the ...”

“... feeling ‘lost in dead tissue’ as he later put it, and increasingly frustrated by the small-mindedness of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike ...”

“... When Schwartz appeared one day carrying Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following him around.In 1931, Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an ...”

“... in the City and making new selves for themselves. But Ronnie seemed happy to stick with the same small group of friends in South London. Some time in 1983, his girlfriend broke with him and took up with a guy they both knew called Coxy. Ronnie couldn’t understand it – the guy turned out to be no good – but he found another girl, Sharon, ‘a girl with ...”