“... an echo of Proust and of the two walks, the way by chez Swann and the Guermantes Way, that in the young Marcel’s imagination were hermetically sealed off from each other. Indeed, Proust’s novel was altogether a revelation to Brooke, and at one time he dreamed of writing ‘a vast Proustian masterpiece’ to cover his own life and the lives of everyone he ...”

“... the confrontation of generations that was then taking place in West Germany. Those who were too young to have taken an active part in the Third Reich (the ‘blessed’ generation in Helmut Kohl’s phrase), were confronted with a society still dominated by collaborators. The task was to hold a mirror up to West German society, to show what it had been, and ...”

“... Rainbow, Salisbury Cathedral’ from ‘Various Subjects of Landscape’ after John Constable by David Lucas (1837) The uses of adversity are sweet as well as bitter, as the old Duke in Shakespeare almost said, and what is best about Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape is probably as much a result of hard times as what is not so ...”

“... the many small groups that filled the square. Movement veterans like the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and Marina Sitrin, the author of a book about horizontal organising methods used in Argentina, conversed with twenty-somethings freshly radicalised by disappointment in the president they helped to elect. Not long after the police massed at the ...”

“... of the Riace bronzes now housed in Reggio di Calabria, which are described by the present curator David Ekserdjian, nem con, as ‘among the most stupendous works of art in existence’. Such ballon is achieved through the cire perdue or lost wax technique. This involves making a solid model, usually of wax or wax-finished but sometimes of stone or ...”

“... Africa. Tranströmer, who died last year, trained as a psychologist and all his life worked with young people. Literature – which meant a dozen short volumes of poetry (not more than 250 pages, all told) and a vivid and attractively straightforward memoir of his childhood, also short, called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for ...”

“... and not simply about members of religious orders: Benedictines do not seem to suffer from it. David Knowles wrote a history of the monks and friars in medieval England that was instantly recognised as a masterpiece, but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits ...”

“... mostly about America, Kinney is at her best when writing about America, though she is good too on David Cameron’s 2006 ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. She describes it as ‘clumsy’, but approves of one part, which she describes, in a telling phrase, as ‘haunting’. ‘For young people, hoodies are often more defensive ...”

“... but it didn’t cut the numbers coming in. And May’s driving purpose was to cut numbers, after David Cameron had recklessly pledged to bring net annual migration down to the ‘tens of thousands’ from nearly a quarter of a million. Family migration was not the only target – May also capped work permits and student numbers – but the language test was ...”

“... events of the night of the murder.Moshfegh’s first full novel, Eileen, is narrated by a morbid young woman living in a terrible small town with her father, a cruel, alcoholic ex-cop. Possible deliverance arrives in the form of a mysterious woman, Rebecca, a crypto-ingénue who seems parachuted in from a 1950s detective movie. Eileen’s musings – she ...”

“... David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK ...”

“... This is the right to follow their way of life in situ, no matter what the cost in money or wasted young lives. This right has been denied to the miners, for example, who have seen whole communities destroyed. The Islanders, on reading the book, might contemplate the debt they owe to those who fought and died for a ‘dispute over a rock with a village ...”

“... the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the credit to Hume, whom David Trimble also praises in one of the articles in To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: it was thanks to Hume’s redefinition of Irish nationalism, Trimble says, that ‘a common ground, where dialogue might take place’, could be found. In retrospect Hume’s ...”

“... locked. On the platform, at almost at the same moment, someone he has noticed takes action: the young man in the nondescript camel-coloured duffel coat, completely wrong for the temperature and the time of year, raised himself in a leisurely way from his crouching position over the black case. Somewhere further away there was a cry, then a number of ...”

“... chairs around the walls and a square, black table in the middle. Two men were waiting. One was young, and appeared to have come to the clinic from a construction site, the other was elderly, bald, wearing a jacket and tie. Charles reached out for any one of the magazines on the low table, a woman’s magazine filled with photographs of kitchens and ...”