“... and supercharged sound systems. The fun lasted a while longer before the final crackdown. On a May bank holiday in 1992, several traveller convoys passing through the West Country were herded over to West Mercia, where local police had little experience of dealing with raves. The super-convoy converged on Castlemorton Common, just outside Malvern. Sound ...”

“... an essay published in 1983, Tàpies made clear that he was not ‘much of a sculptor’, and this may have helped him to make the work in all its strangeness; he also wrote that he detested ‘the traditional material of sculpture, such as bronze and marble’. The monument is in a glass box, four metres by four, in a pool of water. Inside the box it seems ...”

“... elsewhere, on another stage. The patient’s story is all we have, and Freud’s attention may float but it never wavers. His transcript is exhaustive – it includes a map (itself confused) of the patient’s wanderings – but also constrained: the analyst must ‘suppress his curiosity’ so as to allow tale and teller to create their telltale ...”

“... on to Marx, Althusser, Poulantzas and Gramsci. ‘Quote marks’ round words, when ‘concepts’ may be ‘novel’. Italics – lots of them – when something is important and the teachers want to make sure you’re getting it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in ...”

“... is an attribute which is almost never applicable to performing musicians. However great they may be, they have no importance. To understand why Gould was the exception to this rule, we need to look at what it was that he, as the Nichtakzeptierer (to use Bernhard’s word), did not accept.An advertisement for Yamaha pianos has the headline ‘Performing ...”

“... here. For intellectuals, in Africa and the West, on whom Davidson has had such an impact, there may also be a sense of the heroic project he has worked at for so long – ‘a history in the making’, as his book is subtitled, and one with striking repercussions on the present – having reached its outer limits. This is less a matter of Davidson dodging ...”

“... in the fields. According to an authoritative estimate as many as ten or eleven thousand Hauranis may go to Palestine temporarily in search of work in a really bad year ... the number of Hauranis illegally in the country at the present time is roughly 2,500.’ So while the Royal Commission said clearly that the amount of permanent Haurani illegal immigration ...”

“... undermine Musharraf, started inquiring about the many prisoners being held without charge. On 5 May 2007, it was told that Akhtar was not in government custody. His relatives insisted he was. Three weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi ...”

“... three days before the party, Lowell had written to Hardwick: ‘I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get me.’ The day before it, he let her know that he was ‘off to London’. ‘I’m sure your Faber party was exciting and how I wish I could have been there with you,’ Hardwick replied. ‘Look around for a living place ...”

“... at each other. Mr Kharrazi said: ‘There was no such dispute.’ She said: ‘Of course, there may have been little problems, but only little ones.’ Her husband nodded, and said, ‘Nothing big, though,’ and his smile grew chilly. On 22 September 1980, after months of skirmishing, propaganda and Iraq’s occupation of some border areas, Saddam’s ...”

“... gifted souls who carry a star ‘on their shining brow’. A Franco-Irish interchange like this may seem surprising, but that is largely because the current proclivity for embedding authors’ works in sealed and solipsistic national literary traditions makes it that much harder to see just how transnational the whole business of writing then was and still ...”

“... she lost weight, her eczema flared up, her mood dropped and her alopecia returned. In late May 2018, a month after her 21st birthday, she abandoned her appeal and shifted focus to the possibility of gaining early release with a home detention tag. But when her mother and brother visited Polmont on Sunday, 3 June, she was distraught. She told them there ...”

“... parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons. Yorkshire, 29 March. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this ...”

“... worldwide conversion to fossil fuel, far from allowing whale populations to regenerate in peace, may be threatening them further by contributing to global warming. The population of the Antarctic minke whale is decreasing sharply because it depends on krill, which thrives at the edges of the big ice systems. As the circumference of the Southern ice-cap ...”

“... a certain lapse of time will be necessary before the execution of this clause, until the public may, I do not say understand, but admit this painting. Twenty years or so might be required; in the meantime, my brother Martial, or failing him another of my heirs, will keep them.Caillebotte’s provision for an exhibition of his fellow Impressionists was ...”