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“... certainly fed into Schoenberg’s next major work, the oratorio Gurrelieder, a setting of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s tale of the Danish king Waldemar’s love for his mistress Tove. In November 1901, Schoenberg moved to Berlin to take up the post of musical director at the Buntes Theatre, one of the city’s most fashionable cabaret venues. It was a ...”

“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”

“... traitorous to suggest that suicide bombers are not cowards, and who are comfortable with President Bush referring over and over again to bin Laden as ‘the evil one’. But it is important to insist that questioning the prevailing rhetoric is another and perhaps better way of honouring the dead. An editorial in the New York Times tells us that ‘each profile ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... allegiances bear significant responsibility for a United States ‘increasingly segregated’ (as Peter Shrag recently put it in the Nation) ‘between the winners in the global economy in their highrise offices and their privately policed, gated residential developments and a sort of lumpenproletariat, much of it black or Hispanic, stuck in rotting ...”

“... in squamae or scales. A poem beginning Lobawn, he calls me in shelta, his duck nest Under a thorn bush on a petering-out lane might cause a problem which a note would resolve. Shelta is the jargon of Irish tinkers. Lobawn is probably the Irish loban, meaning mud or mire, though the speaker is a personified ‘Wattle Tent’. ‘Brought to a brumal ...”

“... how Jonathan Power tells it. Amnesty began in 1961, with the simple and apparently absurd idea of Peter Benenson, a British lawyer, that governments could be persuaded to release political prisoners simply by ordinary people writing letters to them. This remains the core of Amnesty’s work. Power’s is not an uncritical history. He refers both to the ...”

“... an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher celebrated his hundredth birthday in March, soon after he published this memoir; he must be among the world’s oldest still writing writers, a longevity owed to his combination of a powerful memory for facts (‘Who knows wins’ is a personal ...”

“... an artery in his thigh: ‘I got the tourniquet on and a cigarette lit.’ After that came a bush-baby, and after that a ‘baker’s dozen of small, brilliant tropical birds’, but they all died in a fire. Nothing for it, there had to be another otter. So Maxwell acquired Edal. ‘When wet she would pull down a towel, or several towels, upon which to ...”

“... powers far greater than those of natural family groups (there are exceptions, admittedly, like the Bush, Castro, Windsor and other dynasties). Behind this enhancement lies a powerful, indeed fundamental force. One might call it the enabling boundary. The import of Chomsky’s ‘deep grammar’ of communication is societal: meaningful voice is the crucial ...”

“... era, the other marking the transition between the end of the Cold War and the unveiling of George Bush’s ‘new world order’. Both events were also turning points in the history of American television, reaching unprecedented numbers of viewers. According to Major-General Perry Smith in How CNN fought the war, CNN’s public relations office estimated that ...”

“... Lady Gaga, Hot Chip and C Spencer Yeh owe as much to him now as the Sex Pistols, Kate Bush and Joy Division did in the late 1970s. Because of the way Bowie ceaselessly reinvented himself, from his first gig, playing saxophone with the Kon-Rads at the Bromley Tech PTA school fête in June 1962, to his apparent retirement five or six years ...”

“... for those feelings that move them to tears. ‘I went to prison so as you don’t have to!’ said Peter Navarro, another Trump ally who broke the law. It isn’t true, but it’s nice to have someone who thinks about you like that.Trump’s​ second chief of staff, John Kelly, used to refer to his boss’s White House as Crazytown. According to The ...”

“... like a cartoon wolf while motorbikes crash in her wake.What’s Up, Doc? was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from the success of The Last Picture Show. For the first time Streisand was in the hands of a director her own age and a denizen of New Hollywood. Bogdanovich, ever the auteur, had worked out every beat to his own exact specifications. In ...”

“... was my key writer when I came to edit Isis. I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces over such a short period as Jeremy wrote for Isis that summer. They always turned up on time, perfectly typed and at the right length. Their subjects included ...”