“... you can still read some edifying verses, in red letters two centimetres high: To my students: O may the god incline to hear my prayer That all may learn the Muses’ honeyed fare And, by the Graces’ aid, and Maia’s son, The heights of Rhetoric be wholly won. My boys, be brave: our great god will impart The victor’s ...”

“... bounded by northern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Of these, as many as one in eight may have been slaves, whether suffering in Spanish silver mines, tilling the soil on a nobleman’s Italian estate, teaching the young their letters or serving at banquets. Unfree labour was part of the Roman world. The idea of slavery structured the language of ...”

“... At​ 9 a.m. on 7 May 1915, the commander of U-Boat-20, Lieutenant Walther Schwieger, troubled by low fuel and heavy fog, decided to end his marauding in the Irish Sea and return to Wilhelmshaven. Shortly after one o’clock, he took a last look around through his periscope. The fog had lifted and in his sights was ‘a big passenger steamer ...”

“... in the 20th century’, and what strength in such a case might involve, has its interest, but may in the end not be the main thing. In a century of migrations and dépaysements, mapping motif onto birthplace is most often deceptive. Arthur Lismer and Fred Varley were born in Sheffield, and certainly ended up infinitely better landscape painters than ...”

“... taking in the quotidian and cold-blooded details that go into planning a bomb blast. Shockie may be a pudgy delivery man in someone else’s racket, Malik may be an ineffectual and incoherent ideologue, but Mahajan gives them both unexpected dimensions. When​ Mansoor Ahmed stumbles away from the bodies of his ...”

“... in favour of periphrastic formulas such as ‘the Florentine artist’ or ‘the sculptor’. It may be that such formulas are less awkward in French than they are in English, where they seem to betray a misplaced qualm about repeating a name – or the awkwardness may be the point. Name and epithet soon start to ...”

“... and quiet sort’. The original, McCarthy tells us, had ‘in patient quiet sort’. This may not seem significant, but each small touch is helpful: ‘Few prominent composers in any era could be described as “mild”,’ she notes, ‘and in some ways it is a surprising, even discouraging, word to see in this context … It certainly does not fit ...”

“... up children’. This is a little melodramatic, but she knows this. At one point she imagines it may be her ‘destiny … to be always alone’, yet she also sees this as a ‘tragic, self-dramatising thought’. She finds ‘a kind of comfort’ in it. This is fast work: self-pity aware of how stagey it is, but all the more employable for that ...”

“... or ‘bad’ or ‘nice’ or ‘evil’ person. Every action, every bit of behaviour, may reveal an essence. It’s a strange way of portraying characters who are basically innocent and not in the least weird.The person Alice is not explaining her breakdown to is Felix, who is both normal – that is, not a writer, not even a reader, but a worker ...”

“... is full of nets and snares and weaving. Even clear and visible symbols like the opening beacon may not mean what they appear to mean, and may convey different things to different people. Aeschylus made lots of different things go on in a single scene or speech or image, and in so doing established a way of representing ...”

“... is right there on the podium, just a stone’s throw away, surrounded by a crowd of 20,000 who may claim the status of longtime fans or enthusiastic converts. It should have been predictable that Trump would make no concessions to the pandemic. Without a pause or explanation, he continued the mass events that have kept his voter base eager through every ...”

“... apologised, though one gets the sense that Springora, understandably, can’t forgive them. This may also be why she leaves out some of the context: in these petitions, the no doubt disturbing demands to decriminalise sex with those under fifteen had equal billing with calls for universal access to abortion and contraception, to remove references to ...”

“... interrupting each sentence as if the guest is choosing her words carefully, aware that someone may be listening behind the open door. As you read, you can’t help dreading the aggression hidden in the next unmarked phrase, a dread that reproduces the migrant’s sense of unlocatable threat: the feeling that every siren dopplering down the street is ...”

“... Last May​ , I was invited to the Ministry of Justice to take part in a discussion of ‘Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation’ (Slapps): legal cases whose purpose is to harass, intimidate and silence public criticism. I was ushered into a small, airless room with a group of other journalists and civil servants ...”

“... of world-shaking import.’ Ramsey ‘hated what he saw at Evanston’. He avoided insincerity, we may be sure, in his personal contacts on his many journeys, but he may have tolerated, or perhaps even not recognised, many of the misunderstandings and failures of communication which are inescapable in the conferences of ...”