“... of these years remain open to some doubt. The adolescent Xi is said to have spent his evenings reading Marx and making repeated attempts to join the party. Sheridan doesn’t see how The Communist Manifesto can have appealed to an adolescent in rural China. But then he also seems to think it unimaginable that Xi, or anyone else, might have read ...”

“... This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid ...”

“... of the fiction being somewhat cursory and pat. It’s an impression one might draw on first reading the book, distracted and beguiled by the cameo appearances and one-liners flung out like tennis serves, but a second look shows Bailey did as well as might be expected given the enormity of the corpus. When a novelist produces as many touted masterpieces ...”

“... months inside the world of the Beegans of Ballinasloe, or as far inside as I could get, reading local histories, studies of the politics of the nearby landed estate, books about ecclesiastical architecture and histories of Ballinasloe asylum. I made contact with genealogists, local historians and eventually even surviving members of the ...”

“... were, to a lad, left out. In the summer the British Art Show arrived in London. In the meantime, Peter Fuller had died in a car crash. Fuller never lived to type out the words ‘Damien Hirst’. He died before the Turner Prize began to favour younger artists, before Saatchi started collecting the new art of the Nineties. But his is still a spectral presence ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... brief statement of its current force, and a way of holding the whole issue before our minds, in Peter de Bolla’s book Art Matters.2 De Bolla is looking at a Barnett Newman painting (Vir Heroicus Sublimis) in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has decided that the usual critical questions – what does this painting mean, what is it trying to say ...”

“... the idea of entertaining ‘at home’ made perfect sense in the buoyant Eisenhower economy. As Peter J. Levinson puts it in September in the Rain (2001), his useful biography of Sinatra’s arranger, Nelson Riddle: ‘It was the decade of the suburban house, the six o’clock cocktail shaker and the regulation grey flannel suit … Beautiful love songs ...”

“... with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.In reading​ and annotating the writings of Améry, Levi and others I was trying somehow to mitigate the oppressive sense of wrongness I felt after being exposed to Israel’s bleak construal of the Shoah, and the certificates of high moral merit bestowed on the ...”

“... he described, helplessly and uneasily, as ‘beautiful’.Lynch decided to become a painter after reading The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (Edward Hopper’s teacher), which convinced him that ‘the art life’ was the ideal form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to ...”

“... arrests and all-round discomforts that made life for everyone extremely hard. While we were there Peter Hansen, the Danish commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main aid organisation serving Palestinians, spoke out strongly about the dangers – including starvation – of Israeli policies in the West Bank and ...”

“... the direction of Maurice Thomson and associates of such later fame as Thomas Rainsborough and Hugh Peter; and a naval rampage round the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, from Maracaibo to Jamaica to Guatemala, in collusion with Warwick. Once the fighting in England broke out, the same syndicate moved into control of the financial and Naval machinery of ...”

“... places us, who are fat with it, in direct if hopelessly unequal relationship to her. Everyone reading this has a verified self, an identity, formed through and confirmed by identification, that is attested to be ‘true’. You can’t function in the world without it: you can’t open a bank account, get a credit card or national insurance number, or a ...”

“... on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true vocation and chief talent, and he worked at it tirelessly. The great majority of his numerous poems – he described them, without false modesty, as ...”

“... for our imaginations to fill.It was in this spirit that I found myself thinking of Schubert when reading Anne Carson in the LRB (6 March 2025):Let’s start with life, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become ...”