“... and the experience of living with Kind (who was ‘anything but’) taught Streisand independence. No one was going to tell her what to do; her family called her ‘fabrent, which means “on fire” in Yiddish’. She liked sitting under the table and listening to the adults’ conversations. She developed an unexplainable clicking in her ear and refused to ...”

“... 1. enfant’ – ‘widower, one child’). He is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went ...”

“... he has got lost on his way home and said strange things like he could feel his brain burning. ‘No, I’m not going,’ I say, when he returns from the hospital with antibiotics, having just drunk something called a ‘GI cocktail’. But he tells me I have to, in the strongest possible terms. He says: ‘I will be upset if you don’t.’‘Maybe the pope ...”

“... Hu and Jiang, who worked with powerful premiers (Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji respectively), Xi has no clear deputy, no predecessor looking over his shoulder and no obvious rivals. He is, in the historian Geremie Barmé’s phrase, ‘chairman of everything’. Though relieved of political ...”

“... of perpetual transience?’ Kraus asks. ‘To remain in one place is either privation or luxury. No one I know who’s died in my lifetime … has been interred in a grave.’Born in 1947 in New York City, Kathy Acker lived and worked as an adult in lots of places, most significantly downtown Manhattan, San Diego, London and San Francisco, with long spells ...”

“... a way that fits her restless temperament. When Mungo makes friends with a Catholic boy, she raises no religious objection, even saying that she ‘winched’ his father (kissed or dated). For a Protestant to drink Buckfast Tonic Wine might seem a marginally ecumenical act, since it was originally made by Benedictine monks in Devon. Not drinking with the ...”

“... DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive. Miller, as the wide awake DJ, specialises in the wake-up call requests of local servicemen, and the film was a big hit with US military personnel stationed overseas during the Second World War: ‘Gooood ...”

“... inquests and complaints about police conduct were to be abandoned or wound up within a few months; no new civil claims for compensation would be allowed. On 1 May this year, outstanding cases were handed over to a new investigative body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). Its team of investigators, who have police ...”

“... he took part after 1876: finding and renting the venues, rallying and organising the painters (no easy task), paying for the publicity, sending out the invitations, loaning pictures, doing the hanging and making purchases when, as usual, the public did not oblige. He even fell out with Degas over the design of an exhibition poster. In 1882, the critic ...”

“... eradicate such viewpoints from universities. You can also believe that universities should become no-holds-barred venues for free and open debate. But it takes a certain mental flexibility to think that the one can be a way of achieving the other.Does the right contradict itself? Very well then it contradicts itself. The new Higher Education Act appears on ...”

“... adjustment, displacement, collapse), terra incognita. Every map is a fiction, a legend. It is no more the territory than memory is the past.Such considerations would not have been mentioned to the pupils of the primary school in Câmpina which my father, Donald Slomnicki, then seven and speaking only a smattering of Romanian, attended from the autumn of ...”

“... lives at once hard to see and hard to miss, archly recondite and recklessly available – will no doubt confound Poet Ladies everywhere. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be twiddling our chopsticks and going all clammy. Ironically, Cohen herself resists the notion that she is merely bringing light to the clueless, though that is the most immediate and ...”

“... marginal position in the contemporary historical consciousness. In 15 years it has left virtually no trace in these pages. Popular images, despite increasing tourism, remain scanty: folk-villains on the run, seasonal parades in fancy-dress, periodic football triumphs. In cultural influence, while the music and literature of Latin America have swept round the ...”

“... that it disappear through miscegenation. As a teenager he found some measure of protection, and no end of personal satisfaction, when he was admitted to the most prestigious neighbourhood gang of whites, who proudly and ostentatiously displayed on the back of their red jackets the insignia of the Spartan Athletic Club. Since he wasn’t ever to be much of ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”