“... economical, even subtle. Sniggerers will have a field day with Port Mungo. Some of its absurdities may be deliberate (the narrator is clearly and rather programmatically undermined throughout the book). But not many, I think. For a start, the narrator is supposed to be a woman, but she doesn’t sound like one. She sounds like a hammy male actor in late middle ...”

“... to direct rule from Westminster, and that Bradley start paying out the £1 billion that Theresa May was forced to pledge last year in exchange for the DUP’s help in propping up her minority government. The DUP’s deputy leader and leader at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, pointed out that this agreement was not contingent on the restoration of the executive at ...”

“... points to other circuits too – circles, tropes and connections that our eyes and ears may complete. A suite of memorial poems – each composed of ten lines of ten syllables – ties the project together through ‘the ear’s yearning, oír in memoir: Ng Ng,/ Yeh Yeh, Nana y Tata’, ‘syllables like/ teething stones’, like a ‘wren’s song ...”

“... and moon being fully predictable, they would determine possible dates. July would be too late, and May too early. That left just four possible days: 5, 6, 19 or 20 June. We worked out the odds on the weather on any one of these four dates conforming to requirements as being 13 to one against. So meteorologically, D-Day was bound to be a gamble against the ...”

“... parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself ...”

“... the human attempt to represent it wanting. And Malick would not exempt his own attempt: his images may be more realistic than the painter’s billboard, but he invites us to wonder whether they’re really so different from it, to note how his images too are dwarfed and decentred when set against the real thing. Visually as well as verbally Malick is an ...”

“... were probably in composition or in rehearsal. Against this context of tragedies Shakespeare may already have had the idea for a new play, a comedy, to be given the dottily pseudo-tragic title, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. A majority verdict now sees the work as not only badly printed but decidedly collaborative, though it strikes me as wholly ...”

“... reefers And take long pees in the dark. The Prom Queen This neighbourhood seems familiar to me. It may have been on this very street I stuffed snow in the back of schoolgirls’ coats, So that now with the night falling I may yet run into one of their ghosts. I remember a large cage with a tiger Unloaded from a circus ...”

“... Mengi’ event, Brooklyn, 12 May 2023 she does a performance that involves screamingmore formally you might say vocal improv I would say screamingwhat I think of it I’m not yet loosened up enough to saythey are quite pale the musicians mostly Icelanders mostly improvwho has trouble with improv, well, who do ...”

“... also complained about its shying away from sex. The title of An Act of Treachery suggests things may be set to change; but we shouldn’t forget the words of St Matthew (the convent schoolgirl wouldn’t): ‘whosoever looketh on a woman’ – or Nazi officer – ‘to lust after’ etc. All will be revealed in January, so long as the leadership of the Tory ...”

“... secular verse. Guest concentrates exclusively on Smart as a religious poet, in fact, and it may be a sign of our current lack of confidence in literary ‘greatness’ that ‘the ambition and significance’ of his achievement are eventually defined in a context of mid-18th-century religious preoccupations. Making clear the contemporary issues at stake ...”

“... John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams because, unlike his, they are real. His solace is a black ...”

“... much weight on Peter Jenkins’s account of Mrs Thatcher in tears before the Westland debate (‘I may not be Prime Minister by six o’clock tonight’) in order to agree with him that the whole affair made her look weak and her government out of control. No doubt luck was just as important in the politics of the 1900s as of the 1980s. But what prime minister ...”

“... is evident. True, the same media have rendered other voters incapable of reading at all, but one may still hope for a trickle-down effect on them. A second merit of brevity is that it demands clarity. There is no room for the pretentious jargon which still afflicts much writing in the social sciences. Here the historian, who generally writes prose, is at ...”

“... white with the ‘horror of life’. In fact, this was often how they saw themselves. Disease may be the great leveller, the only effective manifestation of the democratic spirit, but for these men it often became a sign of grace and unique destiny. The 19th century was perhaps the only one that proclaimed that art was bad for you. Contemporary medical ...”