“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it in economy is infra dig: ‘It’s not the food, it’s the sort of people.’ Another Tory, Michael Mates, spells it out: ‘He doesn’t want to meet his constituents.’ Coverage of Mullin during the expenses hoo-ha dwelt on his black-and-white telly, when other members were blagging plasma screens the size of ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... the tide of reverent reassessment did eventually march forwards through the text between the Bible-black covers. Some 19th-century scholars like Ferdinand Christian Baur of the University of Tübingen were radical in their hatchet jobs on authenticity: Baur contended that of all the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament, the apostle had written only ...”

“... The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of punishment. Saints not only ...”

“... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...”

“... through the categories that define who they are, whereas, as Srinivasan notes, for a woman or a black person in the United States, it may be quite the opposite. As James Baldwin said in 1961, ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ This seems to be the line of argument implicit in Mishra’s ...”

“... to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky ...”

“... volume of poetry, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919.Gurney’s previous biographer, the composer Michael Hurd, believed his subject’s truest vocation was music and that the songs are a greater achievement than the poetry. Trevor Hold, also a composer, disagreed, arguing that Gurney’s poetry is ‘more original than [the] music’. I am on Hold’s ...”

“... North Korea, indicated that he was ending Moscow’s military pact with Pyongyang and returned the black box (apparently minus a few tapes) from KAL007. In spite of its spectacular successes, South Korea is not West Germany, either politically or economically. Southern society is incomparably stronger than that of the North. It is vibrant, well-educated and ...”