“... The early chapters of Olivier’s Confessions are written in Dickensian pastiche, even borrowing David Copperfield’s opening speculation whether he would turn out the hero of his own life story. The object of this is to characterise the young Olivier as a Dickens child, a version of ...”

“... childhood in Africa and spent a year in bed with a leg brace; my mother caught tuberculosis as a young woman in Dublin and spent many months in a sanatorium. Her fiancé, whom she’d met in the sanatorium, died. Stories like this were not unusual among people born in the early decades of the last century. One of the main reasons global life expectancy has ...”

“... her late, happy romance with Judge Lord; Austin’s prolonged adultery with Mabel Loomis Todd, the young wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor; and the unexpected discovery after the poet’s death of nearly 1800 short poems. The stories of heartbreak and mental breakdown that colour so many earlier tellings of Dickinson’s life Gordon examines in ...”

“... weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus, a gifted poet with a promising future. He told me that some years earlier he had been summoned by the military governor of his area. At the time, Arabs in Israel were ruled over by a military authority ...”

“... Black New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century.In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It ...”

“... the bust Epstein made of him, although he had defended the Christ) and Henry Moore (who, as a young man, had been generously treated by Epstein, but stood in the way of a London site being found for Ecce Homo) were both less than wholeheartedly pro-Epstein. So were fuming academic sculptors and the authors of tabloid gloats and broadsheet sneers. These do ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking relish. Gossip has its charms, but not when it’s dragged out over three interminable evenings with animated postcard footage re-used to the point of ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... Pelosi’s dismissive response to the New York primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: a young politician, resourceful at organising and irrepressibly energetic, who describes herself as a democratic socialist. Her triumph brought irrelevant comparisons to Obama; Ocasio-Cortez is, in fact, a left activist, as Obama never was. She has already been out ...”

“... if it was less preposterous than I used to think. Surely it must be good that in sad Uganda young people are carefully reading Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’, and Animal Farm, and Dickens, and the angry recent books of East African writers – Okot’p Bitek’s Song of Lawino, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood? Surely this reinforcement of ...”

“... and blasted as a view of the Somme, an idyll, as it seemed to me then, irretrievably lost, and young though I was I knew this. But of course I was wrong. It wasn’t irretrievable and to look at the grounds today one would have no idea that such a violation had ever occurred. And it had occurred, too, with even greater devastation at other country houses ...”

“... resignation from, the Unitarian Church; three short trips to Europe; two marriages; the loss of a young son; agitation over the slavery issue – and some fifty placid years in Concord. In one year ‘he reorganised his notebooks’; in another he ‘took a new interest in fruit trees’. When such things loom large enough for biographical attention, you ...”

“... in his own engaging style, something of a prima donna. Ironically, it was while he was still a young man that Hartley wrote the nouvelle that is in many ways his masterpiece, the one which most perfectly balanced the art of speaking out by not speaking out. Simonetta Perkins is a gem of almost miraculous accomplishment and maturity, despite its obvious ...”

“... overlaps images of the place – its privations and regional politics – with a story about a young Parisian couple in the throes of a crisis. One of the ongoing disputes in the film is that the woman says she loves to look, while the man claims there is nothing around them worth looking at. Varda was drawn to the geometry of fishing culture: the circles ...”