“... of reading’ were ‘in a certain degree advantageous. I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice.’ Boswell recounts how the young Johnson alighted on a folio edition of Petrarch while hunting for some apples his younger brother, Nathaniel, had hidden on a shelf. By the time he arrived in 1728 to study at ...”

“... moral life.’ Regrettably, a few of the younger pupils were seen smirking at the back of the hall, perhaps because the book he was brandishing – by Lenin, no less – wasn’t written in English. So now he’s going to take the whole school round the back of the bike sheds, crack out the Rothmans and floor the wits ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring ...”

“... angles … Because the expansion of response possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by (roughly) your opponent’s talent and the number of shots in the rally so far. I was good at this. Tennis is somehow too weird for Max, who, in normality ...”

“... his flagship store on Madison Avenue, she sniffily notes, ‘many of the shoppers were foreign and no one was under fifty.’ The streamlined elegance that made Armani a talismanic designer for the 20th century is no longer subversive, she argues, and Armani ‘prefers, as he once put it, “to be a reassuring ...”

“... to say rival) in this quest is Scott Eyman, an American expert in movie history. His book on John Wayne from 2014 is extraordinary for its revelation of awkwardness in a cinema celebrity. Eyman has also written excellent books on Ernst Lubitsch, Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, and about the moment when sound changed ...”

“... from ‘Fenians out of jail’, some of whom, like the Irish-American poet John Boyle O’Reilly, were now eminently respectable figures: but ‘They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael’ was a just, if unkind comment on the Parnellite use of Irish-American revolutionary ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... with something far richer in narrative potential. ‘When will my bins be collected?’ is no match for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of ...”

“... of poems explains that he wrote it because he ‘loved to see little folks merry’. He was under no illusions about the sources of such merriment: the first children in the volume throw stones at the Old Person of Chester until they break nearly every bone in his body, and the only other children in the book have an appetite for patricide (their father had ...”

“... nebulous enemy from the other side of the world. It could be Bob Dylan performing his ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ (‘I discovered there was red stripes on the American flag’); but the year is 2002, and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ...”

“... Yes indeed.24 February. Last week Rupert and his whole office were thrown into confusion when for no reason at all the management inquired how many of the team could work from home. This was taken to be the prelude to some sort of shedding of staff. Today it transpires it’s less inimical than this, but rather a precaution. The coronavirus in Italy has meant ...”

“... one of the night – one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false.’Time passes more intensely in dreams. It is an RLS hallmark, the quicksilver evolution of thought and the fabular turn, the victory of original perception. He was born with what he later called an ‘internal theatre’, a mode ...”

“... appropriated me, their first-born, with his adoration that, when they had a second child, she had no alternative to loving her more than he did and more than she did me. She was so blithely innocent about normal human feelings that, all her life, when questioned about her maternal sentiments, she’d say: ‘Well, it’s natural for a mother to prefer her ...”