“... Devil’s Due’, a prose text published in the Examiner twenty years earlier, may also have been printed in pamphlet form for private distribution. Lo and behold, a few months later, Wise himself discovered just such a volume.As with Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, Wise didn’t simply counterfeit books: he also manufactured their ...”

“... the first place? The wish to pull narratives together into a unified whole is often quixotic. It may be necessary where we have some reason to think that our stories are in conflict and that the conflict can only be abated by finding some larger story into which they can be fitted. But Dennett makes clear that this is not true of the manifest and scientific ...”

“... worked in Bomberg’s shop, replacing another Jewish scholar who had converted to Christianity: ‘May his soul be bound up in a bag full of holes,’ Levita swore. Together, Bomberg and Levita printed an Aramaic-Hebrew dictionary and the Masoret Hamasoret, a compendium of the correct spelling and notation of every word in the Hebrew Bible. Levita also worked ...”

“... outward relationship with Denis, is an area about which we know very little, and about which there may be little to know. Certainly there is scant evidence of such indulgences in Campbell’s analysis of the final stages of her journey to Number Ten. Like any very ambitious person, and especially any very ambitious woman, she played it very carefully when ...”

“... critics, richly rewarded dealers and ambitious museum curators and directors. Of course, this may be the outcome: Enwezor’s Documenta 11 may be remembered as an event with more of a political than an artistic character, easily marginalised and dismissed. On the other hand, perhaps it will be remembered, in Enwezor’s ...”

“... book relates the British response to the hostage crisis, culminating in the SAS’s assault on 5 May. Macintyre writes that the story of the siege was ‘presented afterwards as a straightforward morality tale of military daring, civilian bravery, patient police work and wicked foreign terrorists bent on mayhem’. In reality, as he says, the events were ...”

“... have been tracked to within a centimetre, moment by moment for decades.Given all this data, we may ask: are there any hints that a tiny primordial black hole, with a mass within the prescribed range for dark matter, has flown through the inner solar system? A flyby from a microscopic primordial black hole would set visible objects wobbling, just a tiny bit ...”

“... after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around 250 sailors and soldiers, only 145 men survived the wreck and made it to a ...”

“... today – to the PLO.The bequest was the third of thirteen listed in his will of 7 May 1975, after another, larger one to the Catholic Missions Society of America, Maryknoll Fathers. There was no ringing oratory: he simply directed the money to go to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, 101 Park Avenue in New York, or if they had ...”

“... On​ 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world ...”

“... care for (‘in his speeches out of Parliament, he should take a more serious tone and be, if she may say so, less jocular which is hardly befitting a prime minister. Lord Rosebery is so clever that he may be carried away by a sense of humour, which is a little dangerous’) – all this combined to produce an effect which ...”

“... an American private wrote in his diary, ‘we cannot distinguish between a Bolo and a native; they may all be Bolos as much as we know.’The Western participants’ sense of the futility of the intervention is echoed in the last paragraph of A Nasty Little War. But no book dealing with war on Ukrainian territory and published in 2023 could avoid mentioning ...”

“... he was related to many of them. Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral on 20 March, though we may think we know it from Shakespeare, is neither preserved verbatim nor reliably recorded in the hostile and conflicting evidence that has survived, but it was clearly a tour de force, in which he laid claim to leadership of the Caesarian party. Thanks to ...”

“... in the civil rights movement, had been rocked by protests the year before Lorde arrived, which may have influenced the panel’s choice of poet. But if she was selected for being less radical than other more famous poets, the decision backfired: at Tougaloo, she became involved in a political community for the first time since the Rosenberg campaign. One ...”

“... more baroque in their transliteration – ‘edificaeshun’, ‘reckreashun’ – and there may be other meanings at play. In 2002, with the release of Mi Revalueshanary Fren, Johnson became the second living poet (after Czesław Miłosz) to be published by Penguin Classics. His work is taught in schools and studied at universities. Even so, it can ...”