“... up with. Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather ...”

“... Shah’s betrayal, placed his son, Yakub Shah, on the throne, but he was a weak and intemperate young man who set the Sunni and the Shia clerics at one another’s throats and before long Akbar sent a large expeditionary force, which took Kashmir in the summer of 1588. In the autumn the Emperor came to see the valley’s famous colours for himself.Habba ...”

“... than those made available by the discipline as it is practised every day, in classrooms before young men and young women likely to be indifferent, or in journals whose audience is limited to the other three hundred people in the world who care whether or not Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost. To some extent this ...”

“... this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... with kidneys and livers, a biopsy on a ball is rarely a great idea. The ultrasound was done by two young guys filled with kindness and sympathy. Both seemed fully aware that taking your trousers and underpants down and lying flat on your back and then having some sort of gel poured on your junk before a type of prod begins to zoom around the outside of your ...”

“... cannot look long at Aesop, Mars and Don Juan of Austria without their faces being shadowed by the young rifleman’s in Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda, off to the left, his green jacket and trousers an irresistible punctuation mark in the painting’s wall of browns. And I cannot take stock of the rifleman – his look out of the illusion, his exchange of ...”

“... when arrested for indecent exposure at the opening of an exhibition by the ‘Independents’ (Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp et al) at New York’s Grand Central Gallery. The entry of the United States into the war made him liable once more to conscription or detention, and in the last days of 1917 he crossed the border into Mexico. He was last seen in ...”

“... dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were anti-social, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness. The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to ...”

“... I won’t, except to say that we probably have a few of the same voices in our heads.When I was young, though I couldn’t even articulate it, I was moved by the idea of Jesus as this incredibly present, accepting being who was also able to roll with things. He would say, ‘So, you’re a prostitute? Cool, no problem, I accept you.’ I’ve always felt ...”

“... getting parental permission for jihad. It was in his possession, he said, because he was against young people going off to Syria without their parents’ consent.The Belgian police refuse to testify in person, citing the pandemic. This angers many of the lawyers, who note that witnesses have come from Austria and the United States.For a few weeks, all ...”

“... Rania was always making cakes and bringing them in for the staff and she got to know the other young mothers. As well as befriending Naseem she was close to another mother from the tower, Munira, who lived on the fifth floor. It was a strong Muslim community: many were from the Middle East, but a sizeable number were from Morocco, and some of the local ...”

“... duty of giving. Lurid tales of advanced conmanship filled the papers: ‘Many beggars,’ Francis Grose reported, ‘extort charities by practising Faquir-like voluntary austerities and cruelties on themselves’; and, in London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew offered a chart of ‘prices of articles in the begging line’:Loan of child, without ...”

“... poet, a Republican refugee and future Nobel winner, had made seemingly extravagant claims about young Lezama’s poetry. If he wanted to see his poems published, Lezama (or his patrons) had to pay for it. It was a flagrant literary mugging: your money or your silence. For Lezama, as for most Cuban writers then, it was a question of perish to publish. Of ...”

“... and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous ...”