“... Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian; my father locked in a corner of silence, not seeming to see us. He shot out his own hearing? we gasped. Yes. With a high-powered rig like the one that kid in Pennsylvania used to send the bullet whistling past Trump’s ear.I had felt what was going to happen in October 2024, coming ...”

“... Tomlinson’s death encouraged Peach’s family to ask again for the Cass Report to be released. Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, agreed to do so. The inquest into Tomlinson’s death resulted in a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The ...”

“... green patchwork quilt of fields corrugated by ploughing reminded me of the irregular hatchings in Paul Klee’s notebooks. These were his attempt to explain what it might mean to speak of the freedom of the ‘active’ line in art. ‘The primordial movement, the agent,’ Klee wrote, ‘is a point that sets itself in motion (genesis of form).’ Thus the ...”

“... pure forms coincide with the apprehension of the inexhaustible historicity found at every street corner, in every skin fold, and at every moment of time.’ In influential accounts of this period, such as Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) by the German literary critic Peter Bürger, the project of aesthetic purity, which we used to call ‘modernist’ (as in ...”

“... then went to ground in Rothbury, a Northumbrian village he had often visited, camping out in the corner of a field with Ness and another friend, Qhuram Awan, known as Sean, who he unconvincingly claimed were his hostages. On Saturday afternoon he called 999 to declare war on Northumbria Police, accusing the force of persecuting him. Soon afterwards, he shot ...”

“... irrational act seem rational’). ‘The last 18 years like a bad Dostoevsky novel,’ he wrote to Paul Elmer More in June 1933, on the cusp of his separation from Vivien. In an essay of 1924 he remarked that Dostoevsky’s characters are aware of ‘the grotesque futility of their visible lives, and seem always to be listening for other voices’, which ...”

“... from the outside: Walter and Patty, the pioneering gentrifiers of a once down-at-heel street in St Paul, Minnesota, are popular, liberal, but not quite knowable. Their teenage daughter, Jessica, is straightforward; their handsome teenage son, Joey, excessively doted on by his mother, is perversely attracted to the Monaghans, the working-class Republicans next ...”

“... dependence on the breast is transferred to ‘transitional objects’: things like the well-chewed corner of a blanket, or a teddy bear, that bridge inner and outer worlds, are held onto with corresponding intensity, and lay the basis for the infant’s encounters with culture. No one minds lending a friend an egg-whisk, but that’s my book, many people ...”

“... at the age of 30, plucked out all his hair, and after 12 years of fasting, gained omniscience. Paul Davies’s exhilarating book, The New Physics, contains another of the elements which a modern encyclopedia needs. It has unhurried, meditative and occasionally even humorous articles by the people who are actually re-inventing the limits of ...”

“... to be another Charles the Great because of what this insignificant man had done in a hole in a corner of his wide dominions. Luther became the incarnate legend of God’s strength made perfect in human weakness: the Bible story of Gideon, or of the shepherd boy David. For it was the religious anxieties and unanswered questions of this insignificant ...”

“... with the paper’s backers, and recent research seems to show him in no very creditable light. Paul Addison begins a commentary on Churchill’s career before 1914 by noting that it ‘depended in many respects on his relations with the urban working class’. His first constituency was Oldham. He was capable in those days, as Clarke reminds us, of ...”

“... truant from a Methodist public school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the end. A ...”

“... of an index? Scholars have recently become very interested in the historian of philosophy, Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-99), who studied with the last great generation of German philologists. He himself told me two stories about those days: that he had learned to speak Latin properly in Werner Jaeger’s seminar in Berlin, and still admired Jaeger’s ...”

“... to know was to miss everything.’ He recalls the attraction he felt, when young and in Paris, for Paul Joukowsky, who had invited James to his room. James waits on the street, looking up at Paul’s window, simultaneously knowing he will not go up to the room and storing up memories which will later make him wonder ‘if ...”