“... And when the crew learn that, due to a chance event, they won’t be able to land on the moon but may instead end up in permanent orbit, the reader can’t help but feel disappointed. The Hetzelian pedagogical drive is now given free rein and we learn about topics from astronomy to optics, with a whole chapter given over to algebra.Because – unlike most ...”

“... him staring at ‘acting’ like a bull perplexed at being wounded by a matador.A key to Brando may be the way he carried us from an age of rapt belief in characters and their stories to fixing on acting itself. If you look at On the Waterfront now (65 years after it was made), some problems have surfaced: why does the Mob kill Charley instead of Terry? Are ...”

“... a state of emergency, it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying ...”

“... children. H.L. Mencken defined their mentality as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’. They held themselves and other puritans to severe account, an obsession they grew into a social vision. They were hard on sin and hard on the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of ...”

“... in Lake Charles don’t look good at all. In neighbourhoods such as Greinwich Terrace, where in May the floods came on so fast that people didn’t have time to get into their cars to escape, the houses look as though they could be taken apart by hand. In Oak Park they look as though they could be pushed into the concrete gully that runs down the central ...”

“... paints surfaces and his paint is also manifestly a surface, or a thing – two facts which may pretend to be one, but what stands out is their non-identity. The paint has ideas of its own. His pies look more like each other than they look like pies, as he discovered when his gallery served up the real things at an opening as canapés provocateurs ...”

“... if only as a panellist, the strident Northern one, on Radio 4’s intolerable Moral Maze. Some may remember Mick Hume, once the editor of Living Marxism, now editor-at-large for Spiked and a contributor to the Times on topics such as Delia Smith, stopping smoking, and the holiday cottage in Broadstairs he and his wife bought to let for £150,000 in ...”

“... the then US transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, warned the Senate Appropriations Committee in May 2002, ‘We’ve got every salesman – 20,000 of them, I think – approaching us about how they’ve got some machine that will take care of everything we do, including not only detecting explosives but athlete’s foot as well.’ Every cracker-barrel sage ...”

“... on, its victims unheard amid the squabbling and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 November, confirmed that this is the ambition: none of Osborne’s major planned cuts was reversed, an overall budget surplus remains the goal (simply ...”

“... believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the Single European Act. Such are the playful flourishes of a scholarly ascendancy. In these pages Blair Worden has even ...”

“... by tenants of temple lands, and rations of barley due to temple workers. These credits and debits may have been calculated in silver shekels, but coins hardly circulated at the time. In other words, of the three functions ascribed to money by economics textbooks – a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value – it was the second that came ...”

“... out all the interesting stuff, politics and economics and feuds and splits. I suspect this view may be mistaken. ‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent ...”

“... was the same in Glasgow and Berlin’. As many as 80,000 people took part in that year’s May Day procession, at which speakers celebrated revolution in Russia and called for Maclean’s release (the Daily Record said that speakers included ‘a Jew, a Lett, a Russian and a Lithuanian’). New rules on conscription led to strikes in some English ...”

“... limits, on pain of heavy fines from the Commission if they break central bank directives. They may still tax at their discretion, but capital mobility in the single market can be expected to ensure more or less common fiscal denominators. European monetary union spells the end of the most important attributes of national economic ...”

“... shall drop from mine eyes, receive it as a sacrifice of expiation for my sins; grant that I may expire the victim of penance, and in that dreadful moment, Merciful Jesus, have mercy on me.Note that excellent semi-colon. People ask how I learned to write. That’s where I learned it.The whole of a Catholic life is lived in the shadow of the happy death ...”