“... had manifested.Behind me sat Jeannie, a Eucharistic mystic, and her Cajun ex-seminarian husband, David. (At the reception afterwards, in his lovely honk: ‘Best decision I ever made, to leave!’) The women’s heads were covered. Time had not passed. My younger sister, Mary, walked down the aisle in a sort of black sausage casing, as the wedding ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... resisted vast numbers of soldiers, gendarmes and would-be looters until they were evacuated by French warships. Musa Dagh is also the site of Turkey’s single remaining Armenian village, Vak’if, resettled in 1918 when the area was under French rule. Werfel’s characters are his own, but the book starts with very ...”

“... the family hacienda, Great Elm, staffed it with Mexican servants, took out a large loan from a French bank and settled down to raise a family in which William Jr, born in 1925, was the sixth of ten children.Great Elm was a hive of reaction. At the dinner table William Jr excelled at parroting his father’s opinions. The children were taught the sins of ...”

“... David Ben-Gurion​ , the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in mysticism, consulted fortune-tellers, claimed to see flying saucers, and lived according to his whims. At one point he went on an unannounced holiday from his duties as prime minister to take driving lessons on the French Riviera; on another occasion, he spent a week studying Buddhism in Burma, and tried to persuade his teachers that he’d stumbled on a contradiction in their doctrine no one else had unearthed ...”

“... to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... Certainly he fell, received a visit from the dead monk and recovered, but as Elizabeth King and David Todd detail, the supposed origin of the machine is supported more by circumstantial evidence than positive proof; it’s an ‘elegant hypothesis’, the authors conclude. More interesting than the clockwork Diego’s uncertain provenance, however, is the ...”

“... from a review by the late Richard (‘l’étonnant’) Cobb of English historians of the French Revolution: ‘There must be some consolation for present holders of Regius Chairs and hope for future ones to discover just how bad, how indolent, how wrong-headed and how feeble some of their predecessors have been.’26 November 1997. To hear Gordon ...”

“... words were generated by the celebrated youngish American novelist, journalist and story-writer David Foster Wallace. Although willing to tilt at shiny targets of grammatical contention (the ending of sentences with prepositions etc), Wallace was, for the most part, hunting bigger game: America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters ...”

“... wasn’t until 30 May that the BBC told its audience there was ‘a battle now raging’ near the French coast, and that the Royal Navy had helped to evacuate troops who were ‘not immediately engaged’. Even during the four or five days of the operation that remained, there was almost no first-hand reporting. One freelance journalist, ...”

“... instruments. In King Kasaï (2023), an account of his overnight stay in the Africa Museum, the French journalist Christophe Boltanski reminds us that it was a wet, chilly summer. The women were given light cotton tops to cover their breasts while the men wore traditional dress. At night they slept next to the stables; by day they performed for eager crowds ...”

“... which we did not. To be cut off from all that would relegate the British to the level of the French or Italians, would finally bury our great power status, would ruin MI6. Successive British premiers, on visits to Washington, repeatedly attempted to assure one US President after another that we had put our house in order, that now we could really be ...”

“... In​ David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the Kinnock-like party leader, George Jones, is a tragic figure. His wit, his passion and his ability to extemporise are gradually extinguished, with his connivance, by a party machine that spends its time trying to out-Tory the Tories. They obey the polls religiously, yet still the voters aren’t ‘churning ...”