“... fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages. But the immediate circumstances – shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis ...”

“... allowing every potential show of principle to appear like a fluttering of small resentments. It may be the chief characteristic of the Windsor dynasty, this ability to make grand things small. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a poem for the wedding which rather effectively takes them out of the great tide of history and into the more local business ...”

“... heroic age of pulp, rumours of mass-market readership, have elected Moorcock as their King of the May (like Allen Ginsberg in dark ages Prague). A Prince of Thieves. It’s a courtesy title: see Moorcock, in the publicity shot for the collection britpulp!, on his throne under the railway arches, a scarfed and hatted Fagin surrounded by ...”

“... prowl in his gait. Lord Peter Wimsey said that you can never mistake a fellow’s back; the same may be said of Jordan’s walk. It’s not lighter, or swifter than his peers’ – not now. But these qualities matter less in basketball than balance, a rhythm that develops in men used to timing their steps to the bounce of a ball. Jordan’s most casual ...”

“... and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at ...”

“... self presented it as a hideous, just-about-unenterable opposite state. (The hard drinking that may have helped precipitate it leaves another blank in the record.) It is as if his ‘seething’ consciousness had now split, hard upon his hour of ‘good fortune’: the axe-blow of it left him – and in turn, his eloquence leaves the reader – achingly ...”

“... worship me but that’s a far cry from love, motherfucker,’ she wrote to him. Stroud may have been guilty of putting Simone on a pedestal; he was certainly guilty of knocking her off it. On the night of their engagement, liquored up and jealous of a fan’s attention, he started hitting her in the taxi, and continued in the street and up to his ...”

“... his break with it, when it came, would be just as uncompromising. Whatever revolutionary ideals he may once have harboured were snuffed out as the 1970s dragged on and he grew distant from what he characterised as the ‘furtive mandarin Leninism’ at the New Left Review. He didn’t believe that theories based on the primacy of class and capital could ...”

“... who was subsequently murdered. He is currently in a Pakistani prison facing a death sentence which may never be carried out because of the protection he enjoys from the Pakistani state. In the twenty years that have passed since Azhar’s UK tour, some British Deobandi clerics have issued fatwas condemning terrorism, but there is evidence that the attitudes of ...”

“... into a more critical perspective on the war. Eventually even the cautious Times came around and in May 1972 put Hersh on their payroll. This was the beginning of a pattern that would be repeated over several decades: powerful editors – first Rosenthal, later David Remnick of the New Yorker – supported Hersh, for a time, even while they did not always share ...”

“... means that some of the five thousand data points used for their reconstruction may be inaccurate or contested. Still, their project makes the scale and confusion of the events of the night clearer than a written text, which is by necessity linear, can do. Forensic Architecture are continuing to update the database with new or clarified ...”

“... the planet for several hundred thousand years, but she was at the top of the news bulletins in May 2013 when a set of footprints appeared on a beach in Happisburgh, north Norfolk. The prints were 850,000 years old, the oldest human footprints outside Africa and by far the earliest mark of human presence in Britain. Surging tides had exposed long-hidden ...”

“... Don’t mind if I do! But all this was still no substitute for live sport at the weekend. It may be that the featurelessness of lockdown time put more pressure on this weak spot or spot in the week. If the days are hard to tell apart, you’re more likely to feel the absence of something that used to differentiate week and weekend. But this can’t fully ...”

“... in routing the French army on 30 April, then left the city again to defeat a Neapolitan army on 9 May. It was the first time Italian volunteer forces had beaten professional foreign armies in the field.The French sent reinforcements and attacked again in June with 30,000 men and 75 cannons. Under constant bombardment, and with great loss of life, the city ...”

“... In​ May 1987, as part of the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ‘wisdom, foresight and sense of justice ...”