“... to lose a tooth at the same time. After comparing them, Billy walked over to the outdoor well and held his hand over it for a moment. ‘I dropped mine in,’ he said. Jack walked over and tossed his in too. ‘So did I,’ he told his brother. Then Billy stretched out his arm and opened his hand to reveal the tooth still in his palm. ‘I didn’t,’ he ...”

“... of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven or eight years – George Stubbs in 1984; Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting in 1987; Wright of Derby last year. None of these was quite as blandly factual as Constable, nor so studiously innocent of the desire to ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... of the dead. Antigone was admired by the composer Mendelssohn as a Christian martyr, and has been held up to feminists as a model of ‘masculine’ initiative. But Sally Humphreys’s findings suggest that Sophocles’s audience – despite what Creon says – would not have regarded Antigone’s determination to bury her dead brother as inspired by ...”

“... Aron wanted to point out that the Hebrew language has just as many exceptions to the rule, but he held his tongue and revelled in ‘I am jum-peeng ...’ Jumping far, far out in space, halfway to infinity, and soon he was utterly absorbed and utterly alone; jum-peeng; it was like being in a glass bubble, and someone watching from the outside might think Aron ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... tongue, which is so repugnant to those who are capable of correct, elegant and pure speech’. He held the old idiom to have ‘contributed to the rudeness of the common man’. Introducing his translation of the Bible into correct 18th-century German (which he still wrote in Hebrew script), Mendelssohn declared himself hopeful that ‘good results’ would ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... we still want a vocabulary with which to capture the central and urgent importance which politics held not only for Marvell but for a host of Renaissance and 17th-century writers. More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Greville, Milton: all those men wrote about public events; some of them wrote to influence their course; and none of them would have ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”

“... last only a few days, it is already the case that the smoke from last year’s fires can be held responsible for five thousand additional pre-term births in the state. Globally, the world’s wildfire smoke delivers only a fraction of air pollution, but the fraction is growing. The 2021 fires are still smouldering, and wildfire emissions from this year ...”

“... about and little dissatisfaction with the lowliness of his status as a clerk, a position he has held, more or less contentedly, for more than twenty years. And so when he is intercepted one morning at Central Terminal by a detective called Pith, given a copy of the detectives’ handbook, The Manual of Detection, and told he has been promoted – is, in ...”

“... Kiefer​ first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue for the first full retrospective in Britain, curated by Kathleen Soriano (until 14 December). Kiefer has always divided critics, some taking fright at his heavy Germanic ...”

“... Within days of his death, he and his poetry were appropriated for public use. The young pacifist David Garnett spoke bitterly of how Eddie Marsh exploited Rupert’s image in the 1918 Memoir: We like our boys to wear their hair rather long – to dabble in Socialism, to dabble in ‘decadence’ ... to fancy they really care about ethics – but all the ...”

“... see, of our plans for the evening and the rest of the season. And of the impending publication of David Gower’s autobiography.* This had been ghosted by Martin Johnson, a man who, since he began following Leicestershire for the Leicester Mercury back in 1973, two years before Gower’s first-class career began there, had known him better than most. The ...”