“... darkness’ homeland? Yet Harris’s ‘thank you’ is not just a perversity. It finds an echo in Richard Wright’s question: ‘What does an African facing an African American see?’ It also finds an echo in Manthia Diawara’s answer: I see Toni Cade Bambara, I see Kamau Brathwaite, I see James Baldwin, I see Bob Marley, I see James Brown, I see ...”

“... but exhilaratingly willing to enjoy variety in landscape and in peoples. The best thing about Richard Jenkyns’s book is its readiness to shift critical attention away from Virgil’s politics towards his treatment of places and their relation to history. As he shows, place in Virgil is charged with emotion, with complex political affiliations, and with ...”

“... R., who’s in turmoil over developments at the magazine and has pretty much decided to resign.10 May, Yorkshire. From being an unqualified admirer of Philip Roth, which I still pretty much am, I feel (as I did about Francis Bacon) that I’ve been told too much. On the plus side he’s very generous, helping friends down on their luck, dispensing large sums ...”

“... the gallows, which is so placed respecting the town, that the towns people from the High-Street may sit at their shop doors, and see the criminals executed.’ In this passage (brought to my attention by Lincoln Faller, who uses it effectively in his forthcoming book on Defoe), the reader is invited to share the pain of travel, including seeing too ...”

“... Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile ...”

“... when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the ...”

“... his third bottle of wine of the night. The precise date of his death isn’t known, though it may well have been 22 February, when he was last seen at the Napier.Johnson was an avid reader of newspapers. Among the correspondents to whom he meticulously relayed news from the Kent Evening Post and the Sheerness Times Guardian were Hannah Arendt, Christa ...”

“... resolved themselves into a Scottish Parliament which has struggled to live up to expectations. Richard Leonard, elected as the new leader of Scottish Labour last month, ran on a platform condemning the ‘managerialism’ that has characterised both Labour and the SNP’s approach to devolved government since 1999, pledging to ‘stretch every sinew’ of ...”

“... Westwood – faced criminal charges. The performance was a publicity stunt devised by McLaren and Richard Branson to promote the band’s new single. The Silver Jubilee’s real radical was the Black activist Darcus Howe, born in Trinidad in 1943. As Howe knew, the monarchy wasn’t just a symbol of empire but was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. In ...”

“... no mistakes, just happy accidents’ – are filed here under ‘unintentional’, but while Ross may not have called his style ASMR, he knew what he was doing. The truly unintentional clips are curiosities, but it’s hard to say what exactly connects the rhythmic hum of a sewing machine, the crackle of tinfoil and advertisements for flat-pack furniture ...”

“... Of course, in the 17th and 18th centuries many men expressed disgust at aspects of domestic work. Richard Bentley could think of nothing more disparaging to say about his opponents’ views on Classical literature than that they belonged in the dripping-pan, and Swift’s ‘Directions to Servants’ show a morbid disgust at problems of the disposal of human ...”

“... operated by Cuadrilla. At around 8 a.m. on 25 July 2017, as seven lorries approached the site, Richard Roberts, a piano restorer from London, got through a police cordon and climbed on top of the first lorry, bringing the convoy to a standstill. Rich Loizou, a teacher from Devon, climbed onto the cab of the final lorry. At around 3 p.m. Simon Blevins, a ...”

“... the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one ...”

“... contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be based on a realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the object.’ Love and hate – a too simple vocabulary, and so never quite the right names – are the common source, the elemental feelings with which we apprehend the world; they are ...”

“... of the Cold War it is time to start again. None of the old assumptions applies any longer. Russia may be difficult to deal with but it is not an enemy: we have relatively normal relations with it. The US now has strategic nuclear primacy over Russia: its chances of disabling Russian nuclear forces with a first strike are estimated at more than 90 per ...”