“... I have examined the case of the unhappy Convicts lately transmitted from Scotland; as to the Young Man I am very willing to Shew mercy, as to the Woman, I cannot see it quite in the same light, but think it may not be improper to send to the proper Office in Scotland for a Report with regard to the Woman, as I am ever desirous to be perfectly convinc’d ...”

“... But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms designed to give ...”

“... Gabriel Atkin, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Rex Whistler and above all the unbearable Stephen Tennant with his pearls and tantrums – but these tortuous episodes, in which Sassoon often gave as much hell as he got, are greatly revealing of his dissatisfaction as well as evocative of the period.Wilson quotes freely from Sassoon’s verse, the ...”

“... request reports on the latest sightings from RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham ...”

“... from severe asthma and analysts could be chary about ‘tackling an asthmatic’, as Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, had put it when he refused to take him on), and then to begin a training analysis with Sylvia Payne the following year. The training was ‘rushed through’, she later said, because so many analysts were away doing war and ...”

“... conflict. Shakespeare’s omission of these geopolitical contexts are perhaps an example of what Stephen Greenblatt has called his ‘strategic opacity’ – a gap into which we are encouraged to place our own interpretations. But there is more to say about the significance of ignored sources. Editors and critics have tended to think about Shakespeare’s ...”

“... a Ron Paul 2008 sweatshirt. Everyone was trying to find the actual DOGE engineers in the crowd of young men. ‘I’m sick of Elon,’ a political consultant told me. ‘He’s not funny. After he’s done doing all of this, he better give a billion dollars to the midterm elections.’ A senior State Department official was sandwiched into a corner at the top ...”

“... by Mrs Beeton at every turn, perhaps even after they had been many years in service. Of course young wives, or Esther Summer-son-style dependent relatives, were equally ignorant when they first took up their duties of household management. But they at least had a copy of the book; they read it; and they were the normal conduit by which the knowledge in it ...”

“... two nations, Remainia and Leaveland,’ the blurb might run. ‘Remainia is a thriving country of young, highly educated people of a myriad ethnicities, the streets bustling with shops, cafés and restaurants. Leaveland is a country of the old, the white and the nostalgic, of ruined factories and boarded-up shops. Rushing along the network of high-speed rail ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... where Bloom is Moses the precursor of Christ, the liberator; Parnell is both Moses and Christ; and Stephen is Christ the Hero. However, Joyce’s idea of the Irish nation is inclusive rather than exclusive – it is a definition beyond tribalism, beyond religious creed. And those Irish historians who congratulate themselves on their freedom from tribal ...”

“... the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan, like those nice young poets sent north to report back on the dining habits of the natives. To listen on buses and in pubs. Jack London became a disguised tourist in the lower depths for The People of the Abyss in 1902, but Knowles plays smart. She dresses correctly, making the ...”

“... imagine her holding a tambourine or with her legs crossed around a bongo drum. ‘The not-so-young among the holy barbarians are not “settling down”, as the nonconformists of the past have done. Some of them are already bringing up families and they are still “beat”,’ Lawrence Lipton writes in The Holy Barbarians, a passage that always comes to ...”

“... cabinet secret. There is no tomorrow. But Mme de T–– had not expected to tangle with the young chevalier and now her real lover (stalking the shadows of the story) has been cuckolded. Something has changed, and not even Mme de T–– can claim to control the workings of circumstance. It is a libertine truth that you cannot rehearse a ...”