“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... A slight dust storm moves us indoors, where we sit around a big table, pecking at our laptops, reading news agency reports and emails. No place on earth is now too remote for men to be reached by emails from the merchants of penis enlargement. Much time is wasted as a result of this technology. It is supposed to enable you to gather more information, and ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... a 43-year-old former flight attendant who charged a line of police with an industrial wheelie bin. Peter Lynch, 61, joined a mob that tried to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham; he was carrying a placard condemning the ‘deep state’, the World Health Organisation and Nasa. In Bristol, Ashley Harris, the 36-year-old owner of a scaffolding ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rather than conflate, the two separate criteria to which the Court is to have regard? On re-reading the chapter in the Report which deals with the Court of Appeal, I find myself still in two minds. Although I am strongly attracted to the catch-all Scottish principle – is there or might there be a miscarriage here, or should the verdict stand? – I ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... Holocaust, or that their leaders have encouraged this interpretation: both adhere to a theological reading of history based on mythic repetition, in which any violence against Jews, regardless of the context, is understood within a continuum of persecution; they are incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews, and violence against Jews in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”