“... the age of plantation slavery there were ‘good banks’ and ‘bad banks’, and that Barclays may be identified as one of the ‘bad’ ones. But Barclays was neither unusually guilty nor unusually innocent. At the time, there was no such thing as a British bank that didn’t profit from slavery or have investments in human bondage in one form or ...”

“... and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too.The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As ...”

“... the growing number of foreign-funded NGOs engaged in the promotion of ‘civil society’. There may also have been more shadowy forces at work. The late Greg Stephens, an operative with the US political consultancy Black, Manafort and Stone, exclaimed proudly at a meeting in London: ‘I did Georgia. $30 million. So cheap!’Saakashvili kept his ...”

“... skilful interlocution could enable others to be manipulated almost without their knowledge. Morus may be speaking for his creator when he recommends indirect methods of giving advice, ‘emotional appeals, hesitation and words broken by silences’, spurring the listener to ‘seek out the secret which he would not perhaps believe if he heard it openly ...”

“... are not meant to be understood, you understand./They are only meant to terrify & comfort.’ Rilke may have been a ‘jerk’, but Berryman is here channelling the opening lines of the first Duino elegy and the terrifying angel that ‘serenely disdains/to annihilate us’. The comfort lies merely in not being annihilated.Berryman’s first Dream Song was ...”

“... claimed that network censorship made him and his writers more creative, which is as may be; what’s certain is that it defanged American comedy and completely eliminated the phallic fun of an earlier era’s low-comic hijinks. Harpo’s horn, Chaplin’s cane, W.C. Fields’s walking stick, Groucho’s cigar – the accoutrements of aggression ...”

“... tricks of local scoundrels, and the deliberate distortion of Party instructions’. Who knows, she may even have shared her lover Israel Frank-Kamenetsky’s enthusiasm for collectivisation as a form of cultural enlightenment for the backward peasantry, though in retrospect she described this as a ‘foolish infatuation’ which, out of love, she tolerated.But ...”

“... at Israeli border control, do people know why they were allowed through in April, say, but not in May? Last month I crossed from Jordan, as one of the guests invited to the Palestine Festival of Literature, a touring event that goes to audiences who wouldn’t be able to attend if the week-long series of readings and workshops were held in a single venue: the ...”

“... secret police chief, Beria, Stalin finally ordered the Tatars to be deported. On the night of 18 May 1944, the NKVD rounded up more than 200,000 Tatars, including invalids, the elderly, children, women and even those who had fought for the Red Army and the partisans. Given only a few minutes’ notice, they were transported in wooden cattle cars east to the ...”

“... much their opponents want to destroy them, it is not easy to kill several million people. 22 ...”

“... her bisexuality (she lived for a decade with Til Brugman, a Dutch poet and translator), this too may factor into her interest in women, her concern not just with what they want, but what they are and can be. What other artist – what other woman? – could have written a manifesto for her fellow embroiderers? ‘You, craftswomen,’ she began, ‘modern ...”

“... requirements. Under the revised bill, which still awaits final approval, the number of applicants may be capped at 1800 heads of household. (Malta’s population is 420,000.) A residence requirement has been added, though it is only for a year and applicants won’t have to be physically present the whole time. The opposition also successfully pushed for a ...”

“... Prose thinks there is a deep misogyny in this film, and has written eloquently about it. She may be right, if misogyny is the name for what drives a movie that is interested only in its female characters – the sister too (wonderfully played by Sally Hawkins) has moments of something resembling uncaricatured life, while all the men are just stooges or ...”

“... promised not to count properly. Of course time can’t halt entirely. It’s a long long way from May to December, as the song says, or from Bill of Divorcement (1932) to Love Affair (1994), and you can see much of the road in the current season of Hepburn films at the BFI. The brittle bony face does get brittler and bonier, the dry voice gets dryer. But ...”

“... childhood friend – Harper Lee and Capote grew up in the same small town in Alabama – may have come to know, at last, that success breeds its own vices, not least of which is the market’s determination to sell imperfection in place of perfection when the stock is running low. I’ve always had a soft spot for the famous novel. I like its prose ...”