“... copper in size eleven shoes, but not the queers: ‘to my mind the stronger and the bigger the man the more interested they are in getting to know the other side of him.’ Once he had a chap who was interested in him: ‘I gave him a smile,’ and the man followed Butcher right across town and in at the back door of the ...”

“... long since reanimated as desirable ‘resi’, on which my grandfather had his first job (‘A man’s job, at fourteen’) – and in a few minutes you reach a clutch of houses which might have been grafted from a garden city. These ‘cottages’ – in fact substantial terraces and semis – are set back from the road, with ample room for gardens, front ...”

“... D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers, a book he sometimes taught. There, the young Lawrence figure, Paul Morel, long at odds with his father, also feels when his mother dies an irresistible relief from emotional smothering, even though he adored and had tended her. It is symptomatic of Atlas’s uptight, prejudicial feelings about Bellow, and particularly about ...”

“... off topic 50 per cent of the time compared to Biden’s 30 per cent. It didn’t matter. Only one man looked like he knew where he was.The Trump-Biden debate stands as an indictment of America’s political system: something has gone badly wrong when an elderly politician with Trump’s flaws of character and competence can be provided with a platform that ...”

“... a book, spoken a speech?’). Even so, the story remains a contest between Moby Dick, the thinking man’s whale, in his ‘pyramidal silence’, and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was ...”

“... the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were atrophying as those of other empires had done (see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) were allayed by victory in the Cold War and the subsequent discovery ...”

“... seeming so dark or sordid a journey. The hotels were white. ‘They come here to die,’ wrote the man who laid out the gardens by the pier at Bournemouth. ‘Let us make death beautiful.’ The Royal National Sanitarium opened in 1855, followed by specialised ‘homes’ for invalid ladies, or for consumptives who invaded the town on account of the ...”

“... was extraordinary the degree to which everything ultimately revolved around this one man’ – which Garton Ash observed as a participant alongside Václav Klaus or Jirí Dienstbier in the headquarters of the Civic Forum, ‘the very heart of the revolution’, as the old order disintegrated around it. Adventurer and admirer have seldom been so ...”

“... Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who sorted all the bets by hand, totted up the wins and losses on a calculator and kept a doleful eye on the rest of us. He didn’t say much. Only very occasionally did he intervene. I have three distinct memories of working there. The first is of the ...”

“... Busson. My mistake.) Some of its trustees turn up in politics: the Conservatives’ Lord Fink and Paul Marshall, a Lib Dem and chairman of Marshall Wace, a large hedge fund. Marshall is also the chair of the DfE’s board of non-executive directors. Until recently, Sir Theodore Agnew of the Inspiration Trust, which runs 12 schools in Norfolk, was also a Ned ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... Bible while Dr Moynihan molested Lucia and her sister, which, as the protagonist in ‘Panteón de Dolores’ muses, he must have done to their mother too. Their only real protection was the mythic and tequila-breathing Uncle John, who always knew what to say, crying out ‘this situation calls for enchiladas’ whenever things really disintegrated. He had ...”

“... sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”

“... reads extracts from his essay about migration. The full article is below. A young, personable man who speaks fair English, Hamraz had been in Dunkirk for about a month when we met. He was a member of the Afghan National Army, from the district of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a ...”