“... house was likely to involve a discussion about the placing of a sculpture or just how high on the wall a tapestry should hang. He loved arguing about who was the greatest this or that – he was passionate about cricket, perhaps his penchant for making dream teams came from there. In his own case there are no lists to be made. No one else was playing quite ...”

“... but forced labour on projects such as the concrete defence emplacements of the ‘West Wall’. Stargardt describes a ‘massive effort’ on the part of the non-combatant sections of the population without mentioning that people were often sent there as a punishment for refractory behaviour in the workplace. The work was dirty and exhausting, and ...”

“... the ‘white majoritarian culture’ about the dangers of immigration. Orbán, who has built a wall on the Serbian border to keep out migrants, declares that he is defending the whole of European civilisation. Yet for liberals and the left, Betts observes, the idea of civilisation is ‘a source of chagrin and loathing, a hangover from the era of ...”

“... media did their best to conceal the conditions in these homes. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990, however, Western journalists were able to gain access to these places and expose the atrocious conditions inside them. As Herzog writes, children ‘were systematically neglected, tied down to beds, in some cases ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”

“... of Time, a detective novel set entirely in a hospital bedroom, which is also an apologia for Richard III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she ...”

“... There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is still maintained here, at St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. The first thing you notice is an exotic Rumanian screen, for St Dunstan’s is much used by members of a Rumanian Church in communion with the Church of England ...”

“... anti-vaxxer, QAnon, birtherism, Biden’s election ‘steal’.In the early 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a ‘paranoid style’ in American political culture. The Whigs of the mid-19th century had emerged, at least in part, out of the Anti-Masonic Party, and the Republican Party that succeeded the Whigs in the 1850s was not only hostile ...”

“... a barrier that not only protects lives and property but blocks the sight of the sea. Behind the wall, the sea might be higher than the ground you stand on, but you can still forget it’s there.Chestnut Homes, the company building the Quadrant, and Boston Borough Council, which provided the planning permission, claim they’re safe behind the new barrier ...”

“... war), ‘go home’ denunciations of Democrats and, most potent of all, immigration and the wall with Mexico. The pieces can be juggled almost at random. Still, the apparent evacuation of Syria was major news, and it hogged the headlines very satisfactorily. It was, he said on Twitter, ‘time for us to get out’ and let others ‘figure the situation ...”

“... There is here a bust of John Cowper, with large pictures of his photogenic face. There is a wall of his books which (with a few of T. F.’s and Llewellyn’s offering fraternal support) seem to dominate over the shelves of Dostoevsky, Hesse and Tolkien, while a Beethoven quartet accompanies the browsing, and little fish play in the Oriental pond by the ...”

“... Bas Relief: Nude (1958), a drippy hank of white plaster flung on a wooden plank which, hung on the wall, looks like an inexplicable object found in the trash. Aldo Tambellini’s Untitled (1961) is a chunk of concrete fixed to a wooden block, a bit of construction-site detritus that would seem dangerous even without the spikes and nails the artist has jammed ...”

“... is available on the ground. The most substantial of the completed buildings is the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. There are photographs of the exterior which make it possible to grasp the look of the whole, but while you are offered interior views of stairs and circulation spaces it is almost impossible to work out ...”

“... thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ...”

“... restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian coroplasts cluttered the shops of St Tropez. That Diary is ...”