“... Manteo and Wanchese, two men from what is now North Carolina, worked with Raleigh’s navigator Thomas Hariot to devise an Algonquian alphabet to learn about America’s ‘singuler great comodities’. Between 1550 and 1800 the Americas were the source of 80 per cent of the world’s silver and 70 per cent of its gold, although as Raleigh and his ...”

“... piffle’. Who’s to tell how few of them, or how many hundreds of thousands more, have ever heard the piece from start to finish? The question would not interest the city editors, but as a rhetorical device has long been popular with the cultural authorities. If in the homelands of the Austro-German symphony a ...”

“... revenge for the Franco-Prussian War. The Boulez-Chéreau Ring has also been described, more preposterously, as ‘the Ring of the century’ – an accolade which plainly belongs to the 1951 Wieland Wagner production which inaugurated the ‘New Bayreuth’. Musically, the Boulez Ring cannot compare with Furtwängler’s La Scala performance or ...”

“... wronged.Mary Ellen was a novelist’s daughter as well as a novelist’s wife; her father was Thomas Love Peacock. As a youthful walker and talker and poet and witty novelist, Peacock seemed unlikely to find gainful employment (Shelley helped him out when he was imprisoned for debt). He liked women and lived with his clever mother; he fell in love, was ...”

“... That marvellous line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘At the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word ...”

“... five hundred street injectors, but cocaine use has rocketed in the last few years. In the Thistle, more than 60 per cent of injections are of cocaine. Some people mix the two to create ‘snowballs’; Ryan alternates between them. In 2023, there was a 30 per cent increase in the number of people requiring hospital treatment for cocaine use in Glasgow, though ...”

“... art-world figure I knew in New York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to ...”

“... Almost no one noticed. If his name was ever mentioned it was usually in connection with those of more famous collaborators. He was the producer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary flop Zabriskie Point, which came out in 1970, and the year before he made a cameo appearance in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where ‘Harrison Starr, the ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”

“... Sometimes​ there’s nothing more useful than bad news. So when it was confirmed at the start of September that Canada’s economy was in recession, the leaders of the opposition parties were turning cartwheels on their way to the stump. ‘The news that is consuming Ottawa today is old hat to Canadians across the country,’ declared Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party’s youthful leader and the son of Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau ...”

“... Ballard from having to invent his climatic catastrophe and gives his 1987 apocalyptic fable a more ominous edge of realism. In the ‘dead heart of the African continent’ somewhere between Chad, the Sudan and the Central African Republic, Dr Mallory works for the WHO in an apparently futile search for water on the dried-up bed of Lake Kotto, a task in ...”

“... poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the widely acclaimed Elegies (1985). Terry Street and the two following volumes, The Happier Life and Love or Nothing, were well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and ...”

“... at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other ...”

“... that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either. And Brian Burch, Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing ...”

“... smile of a tolerant agnostic: his light, amused impressions illustrate the way England has become more secular than other nations, during this century. Though he claims to have an unreliable memory, he can remember being a beautiful baby of two, in 1912, and screaming at a parson who approached his pram, saying: ‘Hello, my little man.’ He can remember ...”