“... season can cover you. The litany can be in the list. A can of cling peaches, properly labelled, may not seem like much of an inheritance. But for her it has been everything, more than gold, shared out among her books along with the loaves and the fishes. We have not, while they lasted, gone ...”

“... met in Cambridge, and to his great chagrin was ‘arbitrarily expelled’ from the Soviet Union in May 1964 and not readmitted for 24 years.I met Peter a few months after this, shortly after my own arrival as a raw graduate student from Australia. He was very kind to me. He told me that all Russians have two faces, the conformist one you first see, which is a ...”

“... because in her imagination (as in late James, though not in Woolf or Mansfield) love’s object may be worthy, and consummation isn’t only for dreams. There’s always irony, but there’s also always more than irony:‘I say, Rachel, I tell you a thing we might do –’ …Rachel wound herself up in her muffler by way of a protest. She had a funny ...”

“... a quick beheading could work wonders. Unlike Edward though, Henry was something of a prude – he may have had six wives, but it’s hard to name more than a handful of his mistresses, and whereas Edward revelled in ribaldry, Henry largely stuck to chivalric masques and tales of the Knights of the Round Table.At a political level, Henry VIII – unlike his ...”

“... the way society has taught them. So ‘the emotion that [Raymon] felt at the sight of Indiana may be compared to that of an actor thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his role, who finds himself in the presence of the principal character of the drama and can no longer distinguish artificial stage effects from reality.’ Even more in thrall to the ...”

“... out of a party.Great reporting isn’t usually harmed by the reporter having a poor character. It may even be improved by it. Lillian just happened to be hard-bitten in the right way. Her pieces relied on a ruthlessness, sometimes a viciousness, that she didn’t try to hide and that other people liked to comment on. She talked a lot about not being ...”

“... surrendered. The formal capitulation of Heligoland to the Royal Navy didn’t take place until 11 May. Then, after the remaining garrison was evacuated, Heligoland became for the first time in millennia an uninhabited rock.Britain had, in effect, regained possession of Heligoland. But, still obsessed with its supposed symbolism, the British were in no mood to ...”

“... writers in German-speaking Europe between the wars. The oldest readers in Britain and America may still remember The Song of Bernadette, that syrupy but irresistibly powerful novel about Bernadette Soubirous and her visions of the Madonna at Lourdes. Werfel published it in 1941, after escaping from Nazi Europe, and in translation it became a publishing ...”

“... Surviving Shu-style machines dissolve at a curator’s touch. At least one early missionary model may have been consumed by white ants – a chilling image of silence eating up speech. Mullaney frames his history as the story of human attempt and failure, a bold and many-handed effort. ‘The history of modern Chinese information technology,’ he ...”

“... certainly isn’t the kind of remark Oedipus was ever allowed to make: previous tragic characters may have spoken of funerals, but they didn’t mention the cost of the catering or implicitly liken their remarried mothers to a meat dish inappropriately served twice. In Ivano-Frankivsk, as elsewhere when this play is done well, Hamlet’s line achieved a ...”

“... yarn has sneaked into the project at nearly the last moment. Thank God for the escape, the reader may feel like saying. But why is escape so difficult for Knausgaard? If his writing is a monument to the ongoingness of his cage of sadness, why so sad? And will the heavy feeling ever shift? One clue or motif of his sadness that gets returned to often – his ...”

“... for that project, Herzog stands beside Chatwin’s leather rucksack, the gift of a dying man. In May 2018, a group of 48 filmmakers were invited to join Herzog at a workshop where they would ‘submerge into the density and mystery of the Peruvian Amazonian jungle’. They would travel ‘exclusively in motorboat’. Jungle tourism caters for all tastes, as ...”

“... Eastland of Mississippi and Sam Ervin of North Carolina – mobilised opposition. (Ervin’s role may surprise those who remember him only for his principled part in the Nixon impeachment investigation. But before that he was mostly known as an outspoken opponent of racial integration.) As with the Lodge amendment, black leaders outside the South joined the ...”

“... today,’ he wrote when Governor Eyre declared martial law during the Morant Bay rebellion, ‘may be done in Ireland tomorrow and England hereafter.’ Edward Beesly, a member of the parliamentary Jamaica Committee, compared the rebellion to the Hyde Park demonstrations in support of universal male suffrage in 1866, and concluded that Harrison’s ...”

“... comments in question’ – evidently advocating the tactical use of nuclear weapons – ‘may be mine’, but, if they are, he reassuringly notes that ‘they refer to the European theatre, not to Vietnam.’ When his opponents pointed out the radically destabilising effects of an anti-missile system – giving the side possessing such a system the ...”