“... shadow chancellor, after an alleged leak of sensitive information had impugned the probity of both Peter Thorneycroft, the chancellor of the exchequer, and Oliver Poole, the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, ‘with his vast City interests’. Poole naturally insisted that his name be cleared, and the resulting Bank Rate Tribunal found that there was ...”

“... of Pervitin in the Blitzkrieg; he cites and quotes the work of historians such as Werner Pieper, Peter Steinkamp and Karl-Heinz Frieser. Blitzed adds some new and valuable archival detail but Ohler’s most original contribution is stylistic: he puts Pervitin at the centre of the narrative and the way he talks about it draws on the sensibilities of today’s ...”

“... Hall). Although there have been some nuanced treatments of Basaglia’s work (for example, in Peter Sedgwick’s Psycho Politics), the perception of him in British psychiatry was predominantly formed by hostile assessments that emerged in the 1980s as part of the backlash against ‘antipsychiatry’, particularly Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll’s The ...”

“... welcome, but liable to sink if they take on all exceptions to their rule. Inspired by their reading of social anthropology, Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas explained the increase in accusations of witchcraft in early modern England as a result of late 16th-century social and economic change. Steadily, though, incongruent cases gathered in drifts, even ...”

“... does it mean for you?”’ This risks an interpretative solipsism, even if ‘curative reading’ is meant to be ‘a collaborative process’, and Bucknell ends with a glance towards ‘online technologies’ and ‘personal anthologies’ culled from the web in acts of ‘self-curation.’ Other books, such as Can Poetry Save the Earth?, Earth ...”

“... as the CIA’s private venture capital firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel, described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’, accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value of The Tempest and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the ...”

“... the establishment even more than the monarchy. By printing what the rest of the world was already reading, the Week became indispensable during the idiotic weeks when the British press was gagging itself and pretending it had never heard of Mrs Simpson. Lord Mountbatten, who shared Cockburn’s contempt for Baldwin’s politics, apparently urged the king to ...”

“... were another important influence. The first half of the Key of Solomon makes for thrilling reading, in part because the intensity of the ritual increases dramatically with each attempt at summoning. The magician is instructed to stand at the centre of his laboriously prepared magic circle and recite the first conjuration. If nothing happens, the ...”

“... have been victims of injustice: Larry Flynt, Daniel DePew and, at the heart of Unwanted Advances, Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, who was charged under Title IX with inappropriate sexual behaviour (in one case rape) by two students, and forced from his job. One of his accusers had been a first-year in his class, the other a ...”

“... to maintain social, political and economic inequities’; and mandating that schools review reading lists whenever a parent complains. Recently, one school in Florida restricted access to ‘The Hill We Climb’, the poem Amanda Gorman read at Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained that it contained ‘hate messages’.DeSantis is an ...”

“... make it sound as if animals talk to them, but most often that is probably shorthand for an expert reading of animal placements in and movements across the ouija board of the world, just as closely watched sacrifices might be said to manifest a ‘word (logos) from Zeus’. At the most ancient oracle, the oracle of Zeus at remote Dodona in the direction of ...”

“... are 2350 letters in the first five volumes of the Gesammelte Briefe). It was, one feels reading this collection, the way she spoke to others and to herself. She was also a polyglot, writing in Russian, Polish, German and English. An earlier collection of 1979, Comrade and Lover, edited by her biographer Elzbieta Ettinger, had the advantage of ...”

“... fixed on Wales, part of whose purpose for him was its remoteness, brought near by avid childhood reading. During his first eight years the family did not visit Wales. When they did so it was a Rubicon he had already crossed, ratified by seeing hills for the first time and sea for the second. His loyalties were separate if indivisible, and decades later he ...”

“... and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a ...”

“... is another uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor; but part of me, at least when I’m reading this poem, wants to see it all the same, is anxious to share the Magi’s vision when it comes, so I too am ‘hoping to find’ something in the turbulence. I know, as the Magi would too, if they lived anywhere other than in Yeats’s mythology, that the ...”