“... laws on social media platforms have brought warnings from Facebook, Twitter and Google that they may have to withdraw their sites (that is, if they aren’t blocked). Two years ago almost no one was talking about independence; now everyone knows the chant ‘Hong Kong independence – the only way out’. National security, another non-issue before 2019, is ...”

“... traditional, expository narrative mode and great-man accounts of battles and high politics may seem uncontroversial. But in September last year, shortly after its release in hardback, God’s Shadow became the subject of a Twitter storm. Three academics – Cornell Fleischer and Cemal Kafadar, both Ottomanists, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a global ...”

“... cast-iron components. The station was due to open on the same day as the Crystal Palace – 1 May 1851 – but was delayed by two weeks, an inauspicious start for a railway station. It was pretty basic: two lines and two platforms, linked to a swing bridge which took the trains over the Sheepwash Channel, linking the Thames and the canal. The bridge’s ...”

“... agent, a communist spy among the counter-revolutionaries. He knows the movie business, which may be the most pitiless of them all. He’s a liar by necessity and a thief at his pleasure. He’s a serial betrayer but the most loyal of friends. He’s a half-breed and a bastard. Part Vietnamese and part French, he speaks English with an American ...”

“... so much the wound but the dream,’ the poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley has remarked. White readers may see the wound but miss the dream, see the struggle but miss – or misunderstand – the tenderness. (Tenderness can mean gentleness and affection, but also sensitivity to pain.) When ‘the president, the mayor or any other politician’ applauds the ...”

“... picture itself is a kind of window, that the view comes ready framed, is part of it. The yellow may be wild mustard; the yellow is lemons. The olive trees make a pattern; the tiles do too. These are now two of the commonest kinds of picture – landscape and still life. There was a time when people would have expected them to be about something ...”

“... right. All posts and other privileges pass through the baroni. Without a barone on your side, you may as well pack it in. University posts are generally filled by means of a public competition – a concorso – which is open to anyone with the right qualifications. In practice, concorsi are usually fixed. They are designed for one person, usually an internal ...”

“... wrote that the film’s climactic sequence, ‘A Brand New Day’, written by Luther Vandross, ‘may be the first musical number by Friedrich Engels’. Despite The Wiz’s political messaging, what’s striking now is its focus on feeling. In ‘Can I Go On?’ Dorothy is afraid of feeling too much, saying it’s ‘more than I can deal with’. In ‘What ...”

“... at the end of the novel decides to become a writer: ‘Why is literature so beautiful? Because she may be gravid with truth like none other … You can pack everything into her enigmatic womb, every false start, every deviation, every error, even the truth.’In 1988, Goetz – who has two doctoral degrees (one in history and one in medicine) and who worked as ...”

“... me’) and even attempts at self-knowledge, are all – in this mood – plastic bubbles the poet may pop. But she has other goals, and other moods. Though she can still come across (as she did in the 1970s and 1980s) as wonderfully sarcastic, curtly appalled, she’s now often patient, or sadly wry, or resigned: we are all in this vale of deception ...”

“... Some people​ don’t like the idea that they may be living in a metropolitan bubble, but René Unterlinden, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, has been raised to call the bubble his home. ‘De point is,’ his father – not the only character in the novel with a comic accent – tells him, ‘we like de bubble, and so do you … So dis iss who you are … The boy in the bubble ...”

“... off FOI’ campaign backed by, among others, the Daily Mail on its front page, may have helped.)Rather than enact headline-grabbing restrictions on access to information, government has used – and abused – the FOI process to frustrate disclosure. The Cabinet Office, the department that has the most to do with FOI policy, runs a ...”

“... but satisfying joke, inserting the word ‘bum’ into an otherwise pompous phrase (‘The Tories may lose the election owing to Mrs Thatcher’s bum,’ ‘Professor of Poetry in the University of bum’ etc). This time, either too embarrassed or too tired to ask his secretary to type it, he ended instead: ‘You will excuse the absence of the usual ...”

“... form of headgear as one involving constraint and loss. But the poem also hints that there may be a difference between the perspective of the girl herself and that of her father, who wants her to produce offspring to continue his line.Alicia and I both have tween daughters. They were not with us on the trip, but it was easy to imagine them scrambling ...”

“... before Paris, it continues to change. In 2017 it acquired a new wing, by Bernard Desmoulin, and in May this year it reopened after a two-year refurbishment. The west front of Desmoulin’s building, its brown-gold façades in anodised aluminium, panelled and pierced to create a varying effect in changing light, give Cluny a newly confident presence, allowing ...”