“... Birnam Wood, with its increasingly violent implications and its ambitious, destructive characters, may misdirect but doesn’t deviate from its plotted path. ‘This is me leaving. I’m leaving Birnam Wood,’ Shelley informs her ex-best friend the morning after a catastrophic communal acid trip, the beginning of the novel’s spiral to its end. ‘I am ...”

“... My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian ...”

“... The disintegration of the Soviet Union was seen as surprisingly peaceful at the time. But it may be that the decades since 1991 have merely been an interlude, and that the war in Ukraine will be followed by a series of conflicts over the possible contours of Russia. If so, the contrast with the Soviet century will lie not in contemporary Russia’s ...”

“... in the UK. An unsanctioned van run by Peter Krykant in Glasgow operated between September 2020 and May 2021, at which point Krykant could no longer cope with the workload. A pilot plan for a drug consumption room in the East End of Glasgow was recently approved by the council and the local health board, after the Scottish lord advocate, Dorothy Bain, announced ...”

“... something of the eerie, sunlit stillness of Salvador Dalí’s landscapes of those years, and they may have prompted the anthropomorphic rocks that mimic the poses of the figures. ‘Je fais du surréalisme à la Courbet’ is a phrase that has been repeatedly attributed to Balthus.He later denied saying this and also did his best to minimise or deny his many ...”

“... of him: ‘In our epic I exhort people not to name/Michael unless you love him For I do.’ She may love Brown, but he is made to lend his voice to the speaker’s mental fight between Consciousness and Unconsciousness, rather than speaking to anything as ordinary as racism and police brutality. ‘Oh sides I/Don’t do them,’ Alice says, though sometimes ...”

“... it on are not just topographically open but public, a social as well as a physical expanse, we may begin to think that there is a great deal in them to disable. From the outset, agoraphobia has been regarded by some commentators as an entirely proportionate response to the escalating dangers of modern life. In 1889, in an angry critique of modern urban ...”

“... known as “Bee”,’ it begins. Bee’s biography, related in the second section of the story, may be fraudulent. Its author insists that the post we are reading is one of many different versions; the discrepancies between them obscure the truth of any one account. Whoever Bee is, her project is a flight from the indignity of identification. She is ...”

“... of Saxony for the hurly-burly of Polish and Lithuanian politics. Blanning suggests that Augustus may have been swayed by an old prophecy about a Saxon prince who would become king of Poland and recapture Constantinople from the Turks, before welcoming the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. But such prognostications were just part of princely display, to be ...”

“... other kids (the ‘thick’ or ‘disruptive’ ones) and to attribute blame to them. Some kids may have made my life unpleasant, but they weren’t the problem. Fundamentally, we were on the same side. The problem was teachers, and more than the teachers, school itself.I didn’t know the name for it then, but I was a child liberationist. I objected to the ...”

“... His decision to buy the Aranda (now in the Frick Pittsburgh, the museum’s sister institution) may have been sparked by his first visit to Europe, undertaken the previous year with Andrew Mellon, who would go on to form another of the great American art collections of the early 20th century. If Frick’s trip to Europe opened his eyes to the possibilities ...”

“... in Abadan. (He suggests that the Scottish manager of the oil-linked Imperial Bank of Persia may have been responsible for introducing football to Iran.) In the 1950s Anglo-Persian became British Petroleum. As well as increasing its refining capacity, Grangemouth became the site of Europe’s first petrochemicals plant, commissioned in 1951. Workers ...”

“... bookstalls but also into the grands magasins that had sprung up on the grands boulevards. We may think the 20th century discovered the multi-book contract, but Lévy pioneered it. In 1860, Flaubert’s friend Ernest Feydeau had had great success with his naughty novels Fanny (1858) and Daniel (1859), whereupon Lévy offered him a contract worth 25,000 ...”

“... or writing seem mystical or magical. They are, of course, in a way. But they’re also not. Long may confusion reign. Things are difficult; why shouldn’t they be? The nice man nods. It seems we aren’t having a disagreement.Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These are the days. Don’t speak to anyone (except the vet on Darwin’s ...”

“... put it – and he was immersed in complex, unstable, often frustrating processes. Printmaking may have been the only area of Arikha’s graphic life in which he took his time. In 1973 Arikha made five aquatints to accompany an artist’s edition of Beckett’s Au loin un oiseau, a text he later translated into English and collected as one of the eight ...”