“... he admitted that he had been starved of affection as a child’. Wheatcroft suggests that this may have informed his ‘savage public personality, by contrast with a private man who … was genial and generous’. Perhaps. Waugh exhibited that mixture of pride and resentment towards ‘Evelyn Waugh’, as he referred to him, that the sons of overpowering ...”

“... but has the consequence that aortic aneurysm is classified as a disorder of soft tissue, which may be logically correct but feels out of place. The problem is that any attempt to devise a scheme that is rigorously logical inevitably diverges from the way we actually talk about the world. The point, and the lesson I take from Cantwell Smith’s book, is ...”

“... on cigars’ and dishing out blame. Cameron blames Gove for opposing him, as well as Theresa May and Philip Hammond for their advice on the negotiations with Germany, Theresa Villiers and Priti Patel for not repaying the ‘leg up’ he gave them, Gove’s wife – everyone but himself. Having ‘vented’, however, he gets his first good night’s sleep ...”

“... in her case it’s probably to do with early memories, with having been adopted. Stein thinks it may have to do with all the drugs.David Bowie, Harry says, ‘described the music business as a mental hospital: you’d only be allowed out to promote something or make another record – then back in you’d go.’ In 1977, he invited them to support Iggy Pop ...”

“... precedent in Reagan’s 1980s trade war with Japan. If Trump can make any claim to uniqueness, it may be that, once his record on Covid-19 is factored in, he is the only postwar US president whose administration is responsible for the deaths of more Americans than foreigners. During this year’s presidential campaign, while the gap on domestic policy has ...”

“... it’s longer than her other books, and this is probably a mistake: towards the end, the reader may start flipping pages, feeling slightly nauseated from a surfeit of suffering. Alexievich has written that all her books are part of a history of utopia. The utopia here isn’t so much the Soviet project itself – though that’s part of it – but ...”

“... houses, there are edgelands and marginal territories. At the same time, however generic this world may seem, there are the names of local streets: ‘Picturesque villas, the ornate houses of the rich, stood either beside the street or deep within gardens. In the spaces between them parks and the walls of orchards could be seen. From a distance the image called ...”

“... Antoninus, Ingenuus and Regalianus are all barely known apart from their coinages. To this list we may perhaps now add the Sponsianus whose anomalous gold coins, housed in Glasgow’s Hunterian and long dismissed as modern forgeries, sparked a Twitterstorm in December, when an earth scientist suggested that mineral deposits and surface abrasion authenticated ...”

“... had written a charming letter to Aleksander. ‘As far as I know,’ says Bodman Rae, ‘they may have corresponded occasionally until the architect’s death.’Back in Paris, Messiaen resumed his weekly duties at the Church of La Sainte Trinité: 10 o’clock High Mass – accompanied plain-chant only; 11 o’clock Mass – Frescobaldi, Bach or romantic ...”

“... go of that idea. The past isn’t some over-and-done-with thing: it’s still wet, malleable. It may not be the main track we’re on, which we call the present (as in the present tense, a matter of time, but also as in present and correct, a question of place, of being in place, another version of being there), but the past is there too, a branch line, and ...”

“... Serious Outbreak of Poets’ (‘it is at least a possibility that Germany and England may have to “stop the war” in order to stop the poets’). One modern bibliography lists 2225 men and women who published verse during the Great War; much of it found its way into newspapers and anthologies with titles such as Songs and Sonnets for England in ...”

“... murdered, but that is not my view.The trial of these prisoners on murder charges had begun on 21 May 1975, in a fortified courtroom built for the occasion and further protected by a barbed-wire fence, a detachment of mounted police on constant patrol and canted steel-netting installed above the roof, as a defence against a possible rocket attack. Everyone ...”

“... of the streetlights, Emma Caldwell gazed out over Cumberland Street. It was a Monday evening in May 2005 and the young woman’s photograph had been projected onto a block of flats near where she was last seen in Glasgow, on the edge of the Gorbals, not far from the Clyde. She had been murdered just seven weeks before. Appealing for witnesses in this way ...”

“... make a choice: he asked his wife for a divorce, telling her that ‘Jane needs me more.’ There may already have been signs of a drinking problem that would later become serious; certainly, Comfort felt that Henderson needed his commitment and more of his time. She may have demanded that her place in his life was publicly ...”

“... her spelling improved, she seems always to have struggled with it (Horner suggests that she may have been dyslexic). Her publisher’s decision not to correct the text of Sisters by a River reinforces the quality of ‘savage innocence’ that Horner ascribes to her subject.The Bayleys’ marriage was turbulent and Margaret had a difficult labour with ...”