“... travel far from here.’ Fragile things are treasured without flinching from the realities that may destroy them, as ‘the long blunt teeth/of the deer’ grind up the hairlike seedlings that grow from the pine cone.Benson’s most recent collection, Vertigo & Ghost, which won the 2019 Forward Prize and is republished this month (Norton, £19), develops ...”

“... sail. Arthur Beale is now an online chandler, though pop-ups and even a proper shop outside London may still be on the cards. Good news for sailors, but not for window shoppers and lunch break flâneurs in Central London. I already miss the imperturbable mannequins with their enviable sea legs, the barometers and clocks in brass casings, the bulkhead ...”

“... he assembled, done by the insane, the reclusive, the deeply disadvantaged and ecstatic. They may well hold the visitor’s attention in a way no Paris past master is likely to. Dubuffet would have sympathised. Perhaps there were moments in his studio when he looked at the world of non-art with which he had surrounded himself and thought he had a chance ...”

“... is no evidence of any benefits. The temptation to try anything is strong. Mysterious white liquids may be expensive but, according to the Daily Mail, they lead to ‘Mayonnaise Miracle Babies!’ The costs of add-on tests and treatments are seldom explained upfront, and it’s not made clear that many are pointless. Blood tests to count the number of NK cells ...”

“... imaginative landscapes.The boy wearing a feathered headdress in Boy in Orchard (c.1952) may well in reality be safe at home, but Gilmore shows him alone in a dark forest. The figure pushing back the curtain in Boy in Window (c.1957) wears the same headdress, while a pair of onions sits just inside the frame, their shoots reaching upwards like ...”

“... the likelihood, the certainty, will have been communicated to death, and being stood up may feel like a loving reprieve. ‘Sorry, I’m late.’ It must be one of the most popular sentences in the world, but what does it mean? Is it, a. ‘I regret having given you the impression that my time is more important than yours, but don’t hold it ...”

“... was. Lots of things are different here, I’ve learned since I arrived from New York last May. You don’t tip as much, and I often bump my head getting on the tube. In London, I’m told, fact-checking’s not much done: the facts are the burden of the reporter. But at the LRB we do check facts, which are for the most part conveniently located in the ...”

“... is £4 divided by £200: 0.02, or 2 per cent per year. Taken in isolation, 2 per cent annually may not sound a lot, but costs at that level can have a substantial impact on both the cumulative returns that savers receive and the amounts borrowers pay. The cost of financial intermediation resembles a tax on the rest of the economy, slowing its growth ...”

“... character sings in The Threepenny Opera. His hypocrisy is unmistakable, but the ironic implication may also be right. We don’t all want to be human, even if it’s possible. We have other ambitions. Still, the relevant characters in the singer’s world and in ours are human in the standard, technical sense, even if some are fictional. What happens when ...”

“... into ‘a hub for global events and not just football’. The Rolling Stones will play there in May in their first appearance in Britain for five years. If the club’s results had been better over the past 18 months some of the discontent would probably have remained buried. Most West Ham supporters had reconciled themselves to moving to Stratford (largely ...”

“... no consequence, Like a wave washing up on a beach, But which feels like or prompts the thought It may be the beginning of a stroke, But probably it is just the irregular heartbeat Of atrial fibrillation (AFib) Or starting up a reluctant motorcycle. The word throb makes it sound As if it had to do with sex. The word motorcycle means it does. Jeff Nash is ...”

“... means that although deaths in Germany were 5 per cent higher in 2020 than in 2019, the pandemic may be responsible for only a fifth of that increase.In June 2021 Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak published a paper in which they used mortality data from various countries to calculate the excess mortality in each since the start of the pandemic, adjusting for ...”

“... September,* I still feel that I have entered a room where I should not stay too long, where there may be things I would rather not – or even in some sense should not – see. The feeling that you have been led to transgress, that you are being drawn into scenes which are none of your business, is one source of the power of these pictures, for it goes along ...”

“... even if it’s not in the bag – that’s given Wyatt’s music the consistency of an oeuvre. It may also explain why his accident, which should have produced a hiatus, resulted instead in an album that picks up a lot of threads from his days with the Soft Machine and Matching Mole, while anticipating the music he went on to make. So even if Rock Bottom ...”

“... is certainly a sad situation, but perhaps not quite so uniquely awful as the film suggests, and we may be tempted to cook up our own version of a brutal remark the star himself makes to his estranged wife. ‘I’m unhappy,’ she says. ‘So are millions of other people,’ he glumly responds. But then neither he nor we are those millions, our unhappiness is ...”