“... in the years immediately before the enclosure than in its aftermath, and that the labouring poor may have been ‘marginally better off’ as a result of enclosure. There were other changes. Festival days – Plough Monday, for example – were abolished by those whom Clare termed the ‘vulgar tyrants of the soil’. Enclosure also infringed the right to ...”

“... In the process, we see that these two types of material are not so different as they may at first seem. The most striking similarity between the superhero comic and the memoir-in-comics is the motif of ‘double identity’. This is perhaps the defining feature of the superhero. We recognise Superman not by his ability to freeze objects by ...”

“... in belly dancing. Most scandalous of all was his debut back in Leningrad in Don Quixote on 27 May 1960. As the audience waited for the curtain to go up on the last act, Nureyev was in his dressing-room refusing to go on. The problem was the ‘lampshade’ pants he was obliged to wear. He wanted to appear in tights alone, as Western dancers did. His ...”

“... Farrell told Kate Andersen Brower that he got a sense when he was with her of how ‘magical it may have been to have loved her in a romantic way’. Taylor said he was a ‘true Celt’ and reminded her of Burton. When he visited to give her a volume of Yeats, she kept him waiting for an hour before emerging in a wheelchair, her hair ‘as high as the ...”

“... vital energy of seeming more plausible than the truth. And that is our world. Conspiracy nowadays may be as fleet as thought, and theories of fiction gather around every true event. ‘Theories that Trump had engineered the shooting himself for votes,’ Fiona Hamilton wrote in the Times,or the opposite narrative that it had been carried out by the ‘deep ...”

“... behind her teeth. ‘How could I go onstage with braces and two large gaps in my mouth?’There may also have been a desire to adopt a different persona: confident, sexy, untroubled by mysterious ailments or an overbearing mother. She ‘didn’t like reality’; acting ‘was a way to escape myself and live in someone else’s world’. At fifteen, she ...”

“... biggest banks; but the all-time number one champion of pure finance was Jim Simons, who died in May. Simons founded and ran Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund whose Medallion fund, over a period of thirty years, averaged an annualised return of 66 per cent (before fees). That’s a hard number to understand: if you put in $10,000 and left it to compound ...”

“... house next door and he ran out to help. ‘We carried out those who were alive, and the rest – may Allah reward them. Sixteen of my relatives were killed here by the Israelis.’ People were digging with their hands to retrieve the injured and the dead. More strikes followed: one up the hill, the man said, one at the bottom of the slope, one on a nearby ...”

“... and out of the railways constantly, and spend hours – years – of our lives there. The railways may, as Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain, its thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’ or ...”

“... from Russian blockade. European leaders sceptical of Ukraine’s ability to resist the invaders may think again. If, however, Russia clings on to its western bridgehead, it will retain the potential to swallow more of Ukraine, threatening Mykolaiv, Odesa and the rest of the Ukrainian Black Sea coast all the way to the Danube, and, eventually, the whole ...”

“... without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species – every insight that religion must deny and society ...”

“... what is happening this moment, now; who manipulate the dread of a terrible future (and the future may always be terrible) to dull the sounds of freedom. Rosa Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to ...”

“... he writes is unfairly matched against a public narrative skewed very much in Israel’s favour. It may have been with some of these problems of subjectivity in mind that Salim Nassib and Caroline Tisdall shaped their book the way they did. Beirut: Frontline Story has the effect of a montage sequence: interviews with a wide spectrum of political figures ...”

“... Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.Edward DowdenPassionate art, the drowner of dykes ...W.B. YeatsI suppose this is my biography, my life. Fragments of memory. Perhaps even a memorial. Except that I don’t believe in biographies and advise you to be especially sceptical about this one, written, one has to say, under the stress of illness and in extreme haste ...”