“... its objective.’ This decision, if hardly to the War Council’s credit, is less bizarre than it may seem. The Council had been considering the bleak strategic options confronting it in other theatres, and was not told that Churchill’s naval advisers were ambivalent about the scheme. Dismayed by the heavy casualties that further action on the Western Front ...”

“... nature and the waves proclaimed that it must also be a single, identifiable unit. James I, who may have hankered after the title of ‘Emperor of Great Britain’, made a point after 1603 of pushing mare clausum policies in all the seas around the coasts of England, Wales and Scotland. By the mid-17th century, these ideas and initiatives were shifting ...”

“... despised rationality – which no scientist can do, however irrational his attitudes and behaviour may be.) Worse still: Tsypkin was a Jew; Dostoevsky was a violent and unregenerate anti-semite. So, by and large, was Anna. In Summer in Baden-Baden one obsessive, Tsypkin, writes about his obsession with Dostoevsky, while also re-creating imaginatively the ...”

“... and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, sums him up very effectively: ‘All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.’ One is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, Ripley is in fact a male lesbian. Tom Ripley was not a mask for Highsmith so much as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... further reason to accept that systems of social relations and modes of production or reproduction may indeed ‘gaslight’ us. In any case, her plea seems peculiarly depoliticising at a time when more people than ever before are using the term ‘gaslit’ to talk about media norms and cultural hegemonies. As Leslie Jamison notes in the New Yorker, ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... universities that neither politicians nor industry leaders are willing to protect.Feminism may have framed the latter part of Busby’s career but in her introduction to Part of the Story, she compares herself not to Morrison or Walker but to the protagonist of Greenlee’s novel: ‘seemingly obeying orders and doing what was asked’ while ‘trying ...”

“... red states might consider reforming the electoral college is if Texas turns Democratic, which may happen within the next 15 years.) And though there’s no constitutional limit on the number of Supreme Court justices, the very suggestion of expanding the court raises accusations of ‘court-packing’, as if it amounted to political thuggery, if not ...”

“... her to ‘publish a Hutton-style report’, as he had done to sanitise any part his administration may have had in the death of a whistleblower on his war in Iraq: an invasion from which he went on to net – of course, for his Faith Foundation – assorted tips and deals around the world, prominent among them cash from a South Korean oil company run by a ...”