“... into poetry. Not everything is up for grabs. In 2015, Goldsmith performed ‘The Body of Michael Brown’, which took and reordered the official autopsy report of the teenager shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Although he claimed afterwards that his intention had been to expose the rhetorical violence of the report, Goldsmith faced ...”

“... than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a ...”

“... improvising drones to strike land targets deep inside Russia and, at sea, forcing the Russian Black Sea Fleet to retreat, lifting its blockade of Ukrainian ports, which are now exporting grain again. It would have found a previously unimaginable degree of solidarity with Western countries, acquiring billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, to the point ...”

“... infused with irony and paradox. That he should so heavily and sarcastically miss the point of a black joke is a sorry thing. And note the leaden, ordinary prose. (‘Chain of events’ is a cliché, and you can’t easily have a chain of any sort ‘set in motion’.) Not only is O’Brien being crass here, he is also being reactionary. He sounds like one ...”

“... immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, Hersh grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on the predominantly black South Side of Chicago, where he worked in his parents’ dry-cleaning shop and attended community college at night. His big break came – though he didn’t know it at the time – when an English professor at the college saw his promise and arranged for ...”

“... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...”

“... else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own version of her ...”

“... war and peace are questions of life and death. Not the death of some or even many people, but as Michael Walzer proposes in Arguing about War, the ‘moral as well as physical extinction’ of an entire people. True, it is only rarely that a nation will find its ‘ongoingness’ – its ability ‘to carry on, and also to improve on, a way of life handed ...”

“... that he was uncritical: the student corps, with their drunkenness and duelling, he considered ‘black-rotten’, so he firmly told the Master, who apparently had shown a soft spot for them. And he reported that when he translated bits of Jude the Obscure, his Schwerin family were distressed at first because they thought Jude meant ‘Jew’, ‘and a book ...”

“... pretty coarse at the arts of primitive accumulation), the promotions of Charles Keating (S&Ls) and Michael Milken, high priest of the junk bond, now facing ten years in the Federal penitentiary. There’s rarely been a city harder to ‘see’, through a windscreen caked with the alternative myths of the boosters and the noirs, nor one about whose history and ...”

“... of his mother’s role in his father’s life: ‘Her whole beauty consists in two little black eyes and a pretty figure. She has no wit, but she has common sense enough to enable her to fulfil her duties as wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to extravagance ... Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife? ’ After ...”

“... Tsar, Alexander III, “Majesty, if it were possible to drown the six or seven million Jews in the Black Sea, I would be absolutely in favour of that. But if it is not possible, one must let them live.’” Witte’s reasoning was that the Jews were poor, therefore filthy, therefore rightly loathed by the Russians, who had better allow the Jews to prosper a ...”

“... arrived in Buenos Aires, hoping to fly on across the Andes, there was good news and bad. Michael Brunson and John Humphrys had hired a large plane from Aerolineas Argentinas, on behalf of ITN and the BBC, and they were leaving for Santiago late that night. The new Chilean authorities had promised to open the frontier the following morning, and for a ...”

“... manufactured mythology even as it built itself on the ruins of the Communist counter-culture. Michael Denning, in his long interpretative history The Cultural Front, has questioned this disdain. His notion of the culture of the Popular Front embraces sturdy proletarian sagas like Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ...”

“... personal outfit for the 1925 revue All the Vogue, on the other hand, is a severely simple basic black high-neck jersey cocktail frock worn with a single choker of huge pearls, a lustrous lip job and a marcelled wig even more convincing than Hartnell’s. Fashion papers such as the Sketch regularly ran spreads of the Footlights transvestites in those ...”