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“... fluency fails to capture.We now have three new English translations: by Michael Beaney for Oxford, Alexander Booth for Penguin and Damion Searls for Norton. (A fourth, by David Stern, Katia Saporiti and Joachim Schulte for Cambridge, is forthcoming.) The book came out of copyright in 2021 (seventy years after Wittgenstein’s death), which is the reason ...”

“... Hoboken, New Jersey (the photograph can be seen in George Tice: A Celebration, at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York until 13 October). In the foreground is an Esso gas station, a Ford Fairlane parked behind the pumps, filling up, a fluorescent logo above the white office area, the entire station floodlit, probably with mercury vapour lamps. Behind ...”

“... with urine. What invariably greets the protagonists of genre fiction as they open the door of a booth to make some life or death call is the stickiness left behind by a previous user. Expecting to speak and to listen, they instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone ...”

“... in Cairo) keeps the ribaldry of these moments alive in his English translation. Likewise, Marilyn Booth captures the starkness of Voices of the Lost, in prose stripped of almost all sensory details and anchoring references. It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting authors to write about the migrant crises of the last ten years were subjects of ...”

“... films about the sort of medieval warrior-patriarch Stalin could be relied on to identify with. Alexander Nevsky (1938) earned him the Order of Lenin. But it’s the ratio of input to output established by the three parts of Ivan the Terrible that best summarises his career as a whole: three complete screenplays, two complete films, one complete critical ...”

“... because they have produced so few rewards for the many and so much corrupt wealth for the few. Alexander Yakovlev, the great liberalising force of the Gorbachev years, thanks to his brief in the Politburo – Ideology – took the podium first. His limp is one of the rare memories nowadays of the Great Patriotic War. The Communists and nationalists who ...”

“... to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.’Lincoln did not believe that the federal government had the authority to do ...”

“... daily newspaper column under the name of Callisthenes – Aristotle’s nephew and an assistant to Alexander the Great, whom he saw as the first publicist. Theatre and fashion were closely connected. Selfridge’s windows offered a mini-theatrical spectacle, and on the stage there were musical comedies about shop girls, working in such places as ...”

“... like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts ...”

“... is something about the deliberate provisionality of the sonnet which makes it unimaginable that Alexander Pope should ever have written one, or that Ben Jonson (who wrote only six) would take them seriously. Milton’s abrasive political sonnets, prompting ‘the age to quit their clogs’, which used the form to make an urgent response to both personal and ...”

“... in deciding whether to vote, why should they suddenly leave these virtues outside the election booth when deciding how to vote? These questions point to the need for a theory of non-rational politics, by which I mean politics that may be both less than rational and more than rational. ‘More than rational’: this means that the calculated self-interest ...”

“... writer’, and he cut some contributions by more than half. One enemy he certainly made was Alexander Balloch Grosart DD, who was invited to contribute several entries for the first volumes, principally on 17th-century divines. As early as October 1883, Stephen was complaining that he had ‘had my usual letter of abuse from that old fool ...”

“... airless space. I hated it, and only went inside a couple of times, probably dared by my brother, Alexander. Daddy always walked straight past it. A bit further on, next to a lock, there was an even smaller pillbox, but I never got beyond putting my foot in the doorway.When we asked Daddy what these pillboxes were for, he said they had been put there during ...”

“... of light operatic pantomimes. Nor was it due to the drawing power of the celebrated Barton Booth, who had been billed to play the lead role of Julio but was too ill from jaundice to appear. What drew the crowds to Double Falsehood was the involvement (in a manner of speaking) of another, even bigger theatrical star, for it was Theobald’s remarkable ...”

“... The film camera, which rattled like a threshing machine, had to be encased in a padded glass booth that inhibited camera angles. And, as is well known, the technology put paid to many silent movie actors, including John Gilbert and Douglas Fairbanks, whose voices were too high for their heroic personas.‘When talkies came in, the movies imported ...”