“... As he delicately puts it, ‘the ANC’s contribution to the UDF would often be debated.’ Which means that both the ANC and UDF indignantly rejected the Government’s claim that the UDF was an ANC front. It was, of course, a complete accident that the UDF had been launched straight after the ANC in London had proclaimed 1983 ‘the Year of United ...”

“... what’s the difference?’) This inarticulateness seems to create a need for other means of resolving conflict, so that once I caught myself thinking that if these Americans speak English like a second language, perhaps guns were their first language. A steady diet of television’s sentence fragments doesn’t help: complex thoughts require ...”

“... are not variable confessions but different worlds, and different instruments of understanding. David Kepesh in The Dying Animal offers a strong sidelight on Roth in The Plot against America, a comic view of liberty and nation which darkens and widens in the new novel. Kepesh, divorced and determined never to make the mistake of marriage again, takes true ...”

“... reappear wearing little more than a ‘black lace underthing’, Moses H. reflects on ‘what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power . . . After the late failure of radical hopes.’ And Saturday turns out to be a soliloquising novel of urban experience in a similar ...”

“... on existentialism and phenomenology edited by R.D. Laing, complete with a eulogistic preface by David Cooper (the South African-born psychiatrist who coined the term ‘anti-psychiatry’). But readers who have to rely on an English translation have had to wait almost four decades to get their hands on a complete version. In important respects the new ...”

“... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... The book reveals that the army had an official expression for its behaviour: mitzuy ishur, which means ‘eliciting authorisation’. In an interview late in his life, Dayan described Israel’s tactics against Syria as constant ‘provocation’. Needless to say, Dayan himself had become a hero in the 1950s for acting in exactly this way. A similar pattern ...”

“... showmanship in this ‘hyperbolical’ performance to a captive audience, most of whom had little means of knowing what they should pay or whose services they might best employ.The hermitage was calm by comparison. It had begun life as a refuge from plague but by the 1820s was in effect an inn staffed by a number of ‘hermits’ who provided food and drink ...”

“... the ‘future resolution’ of dreaming and waking. While this lofty goal was new enough, the means applied to it, such as playful operations of chance and sudden collisions of disparate words or images, were prepared by Dada. And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic ...”

“... volleys into an electric set piece: You don’t know what love is! – You have no idea what it means to love someone! – You have no heart! – You are a narcissist! – You are entirely unsuitable! – If you really loved me you’d stay away from me! – Love asks nothing! – You don’t know the first thing about me! – I want nothing more to do with ...”

“... marking the present and almost everyone else various stages of the species’s past.By no means everyone went along with what Qureshi describes as the strategic conflation of extermination and extinction, and both colonial violence towards native peoples and protests against it long preceded Darwin. The United States Indian Removal Act of 1830 sparked ...”

“... person, sometimes supplemented by their reputation, into a notion of their character – which means something like ‘the pattern that underlies their actions’ – and we then form attitudes to that construction of their character. In doing so, we are in part judging the creations of our own imagination, since a person’s character will always be ...”

“... Palmerston in the notorious case of Don Pacifico, which Rodger only mentions in passing. David Pacifico was a merchant of Portuguese-Jewish descent, who enjoyed British citizenship by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. He had various dodgy claims against the Greek government, which Pam decided to uphold by instructing Parker (again) to blockade ...”

“... freedom: freedom from anxiety, from the often humiliating and chaotic process of applying for means-tested benefits in a welfare state, from the need to take demeaning or exhausting or damagingly precarious work. This idea has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, ...”