“... complex figures, such as Beckett’s aunt Cissie and Beckett himself and indeed his first cousin John Beckett, whose serious, intelligent and eccentrically minimalist style of conducting Bach cantatas in Dublin, and wonderfully laconic and informative introductions, were, for me, one of the very great pleasures of the city in the 1970s. Cissie Sinclair was ...”

“... to cast a gentler gaze on the world, but the gaze is still filled with depth and wonder. The Christian God, apparent in Housekeeping, also lives in the body of these three novels, but Robinson has come up with the inspired idea of allowing the souls of the novels, so to speak, to be fully human. Gilead, Home and Lila dramatise the lives of a small number ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... ships, heaving seas, the swivelling turrets of six-inch guns; our island’s story, often with John Mills. And yet, for all its links with history, its invocation of Drake and Nelson, the grip of the Royal Navy on the popular imagination of Britain is relatively recent, dating from what Peter Padfield refers to as the country’s ‘Navalist ...”

“... movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early Lynchhead. Eraserhead isn’t what we now associate with 1970s ‘cult’ cinema – it isn’t camp or explicitly countercultural and it ...”

“... escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a performance in John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me at Chichester for which he had been much praised, Alan was sitting in his dressing-room when there was a tentative knock on the door. It was Alec Guinness. He shook Alan’s hand, said, ‘You must be very tired,’ and ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... pleased. ‘The state should not tell car companies how to run their business’: the words of Christian Streiff, the then president of Peugeot Citroën. As in the UK, the intention is to refresh the lines of credit the companies rely on, the ones available to customers at showrooms and dealerships. At the same time, the credit crunch may be masking ...”

“... Battlestar Galactica and Never Let Me Go. Futurity is represented by AI-generated poems and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext (2011-), an experimental work in progress that aims to create the world’s most durable poem by enciphering text into the DNA of the hardiest of life forms, the bacterium D. radiodurans.Histories of large, unruly concepts ...”

“... than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the archives,’ the Anglo-German historian John Röhl wrote in 2015. ‘It marked the point at which civil society in the Federal Republic admirably turned its back on a difficult past to embrace Western values and share its destiny with that of its neighbours. The transformation was profound and ...”

“... grew up in a working-class, largely Armenian quarter of Beirut, until his family was expelled by Christian militias at the beginning of the civil war in 1975. They resettled in the south, in the village near Tyre where his father had been born. Nasrallah shared his father’s admiration of the Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose Movement of the Deprived ...”

“... legal and constitutional rights. Many of these ‘dissidents’, such as Liu Junning or Yu Jie, a Christian, feature prominently in the American media’s coverage of intellectuals in China: a coverage which is often underpinned by an assumption that free markets guarantee democracy, and oscillates between describing the excesses of the authoritarian ...”

“... of amelioration to a minimum’. Much of Hardy’s mature writing can be seen as a commentary on John Stuart Mill’s essay ‘Nature’, published in 1874. Mill argues that people are always appealing to nature to make moral cases – as, for instance, when acts one disapproves of are deemed unnatural – whereas in fact nature is unmoral, blindly ...”

“... comic, with cruel Herod appearing on stage as a ridiculously boastful Oriental (emphatically non-Christian) potentate, his murdering soldiers and the frantically resisting mothers cast as slapstick characters, the horror neutralised by laughter. Kunzle finds Flemish artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder continuing some of this comic-horror flavour into ...”