“... have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel about Silicon Alley. Pynchon is fond of silly names, and in the dotcom bubble they seemed to be self-generating: Razorfish, AltaVista, HotBot, Yahoo! There was a strange connection during that boom between whimsy ...”

“... bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more beautiful than a church and some dynamite. The immediate enemy was of course the beefy bourgeois, defender of property and social order, with his fixed ideas about beauty, truth and respectability. Voltaire had wished to crush this tedious specimen; Gautier ...”

“... Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was to become a stock tactic for conservatives anxious to show where republicanism ended up; Aubrey himself disliked this tactic, and felt ...”

“... and has little to do with oratory. There are plenty of competent barristers, but Kentridge was more than this: he was from the start one of those advocates who sense exactly where to pitch anything from a lethal monosyllabic comment to a day-long submission of law. Of the many, often hyperbolic, appreciations of Kentridge’s style cited by ...”

“... Leoneans subscribe to a cellphone service; even Haiti, the poorest nation in the Americas, has more than twice that number. This is not a developing country: it is, in the polite lexicon of international aid workers, a ‘reconstructing’ one. Yet this had once been a utopia of sorts. The origins of Freetown date back to the 1780s in Britain, where a ...”

“... Ben-Amos then focuses on the discussions that were involved in the organisation of each of more than a hundred state funerals. A prospective funeral went through an elaborate legislative and executive process (at one of three possible honorific levels) from first mooting to final staging, and in that sense these ceremonies were political events. There ...”

“... with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a ...”

“... Eva was determined to build in the nearby suburb of Dölzschen. All of these worries, and many more besides, were recorded in voluminous detail in the diaries he kept all his life. One of the interesting oddities of Klemperer’s diaries is the way in which the new worries brought by Nazi oppression slipped in beside the old worries of a man for whom ...”

“... the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know this because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Greenland and Antarctica: the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The ...”

“... that are exempted from stay at home orders. A subway worker told the New York Times that he felt more sacrificial than essential.On 25 May, at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, Floyd asphyxiated while being pressed into the road under the weight of law enforcement. His dying was watched by passers-by and recorded on mobile phones. Those of ...”

“... are taken with great seriousness. This might seem obvious: but we ought perhaps to be a little more surprised than we generally are at the extent to which almost total ignorance as to what is going on in the other of these two philosophical communities is no barrier to advancement and distinction in either of them. For this fact at least suggests the ...”

“... No American writer​ ever revealed more in a photograph than Joan Didion. She was small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned ...”

“... in which past racial inequalities continue to affect America today. But his less convincing and more doctrinaire efforts, such as the 17,000-word ‘The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration’, which appeared in September, seem to be powered by a diffuse sense of outrage in ardent search of an affront. He presumes to speak on behalf of ‘the black ...”

“... it would be a four-year-long bloodbath: Never such innocence, Never before or since. And, more recently, Samuel Hynes’s magisterial A War Imagined (1990) argues that the generation of poets, painters and novelists who lived through the war ‘rejected the values of the society’ that had sent them to fight and rendered their ‘sense of a gap in ...”