“... Operation Branchform, the fraud investigation that led to a raid on her house and her husband – Peter Murrell, then the SNP chief executive – being charged with embezzlement of more than £660,000 donated to the party.Sturgeon believes that the rights of transgender people are not (and can never be) in conflict with the rights of women. When Isla Bryson ...”

“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... that the children ‘had to go to matins and early mass, kiss the hands of priest and monks and read akathists’ – a series of prayers praising God. He and his brothers also sang in the choirs that his father, who learned to play the violin and paint icons, loved to direct – to the exhaustion of the participants. These activities provided Chekhov with ...”

“... in psychological terms and a feat of artistic integration. Roth was ‘furious’ when he read the article. How furious? He ‘thought of ending the analysis entirely’. In other words, nothing changed. That’s not normally the way fury takes Philip Roth. It seems likely that Kleinschmidt, even in the offending article, was giving Roth general ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school reports read: ‘Lucian doesn’t seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German. This seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his ...”

“... of it all.’ Brophy had stuck newsprint onto the cover, making a collage: ‘Flash’, it now read, ‘a navel by Brigid Bardot’. On the back, the biographical note had been amended by hand. After the sentence, ‘She is socially timid and inveterately literate: she would always rather write a letter than telephone or go there,’ Brophy had ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... from The General Theory was: reflate at all costs. He got rid of not one but two chancellors – Peter Thorneycroft and Selwyn Lloyd – for refusing to expand demand fast enough. Not long after Lloyd’s restrictive 1961 budget, Macmillan was urging him to prepare a reflationary budget for 1962; two days after his 1962 effort, Macmillan was already egging ...”

“... of his later poems. That the radio play fed off MacNeice’s own experiences is not surprising. To read The Strings Are False, the posthumously published autobiography (drafted in 1940) that Faber has reissued to coincide with the centenary of MacNeice’s birth, is to find many such connections. He says in his book on Modern Poetry (1938) that ‘literary ...”

“... of each year, without the elementary social or other skills that were needed. I could hardly read and had never dressed myself, so that doing up my back braces was painful and nearly impossible; it never occurred to me that I could slip them off my shoulders. The little boys were often beaten and kicked by the masters and I found this extremely ...”

“... month was out he and Auden became friends again: ‘He really is very nice.’ In January 1951, he read ‘the collected stories of Farmer Faulkner, which weren’t worth collecting if you ask me’. In February he read Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted and ‘felt the burn of embarrassment’. In March he ...”

“... Karl Ove had prematurely creamed at my entrance. (Don’t worry, we’re safe here: he doesn’t read reviews.)What does the star interrupt? Do people know that they are in the Bible? From the changed sky, modest plagues descend. Turid sees freaky birds with human heads sail through the air; crabs in their hundreds cover the roads; Egil finds a shed skin, as ...”

“... often from North London to Sloane Square, walking away from the Royal Court Theatre, rounding Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse ...”

“... collected in A Nice Night’s Entertainment* falsify the character by moving as fast as you can read, whereas the sentences should produce themselves the way Sandy speaks, glacially. A valetudinarian Returned Serviceman – not even Humphries is sure which of the two world wars Sandy returned from – he has always been laid up. Twenty-five years ago he was ...”