“... looking.’ Luxemburg wrote ‘The Russian Revolution’ on the eve of the Spartacist uprising. We read it now with knowledge of the uprising’s brutal outcome, but we can still register Luxemburg’s passionate endorsement of the energy and potential of the people. She is talking about aliveness – what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons recently described ...”

“... enemies include Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul who likes to buy up writers and corrupt them; Peter Keating, a charming rival damned by too-easy success; Ellis Toohey, an indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the ...”

“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... historical frame, above all the Catholic triumphalism manifested in Bernini’s colonnades for St Peter’s piazza or in the impeccably prim altarpieces of Carlo Maratta, the president of the Accademia di San Luca. And so little moved forward in the fractured Italy of those days. Rich families vied for the papacy; loyalties inclined to this or that ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... me to Marxism than in repelling me from it. I was – I admit it – impressed. And now I read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff ...”

“... and speak English, but the lingua franca is still Juba Arabic, a somewhat impoverished dialect. Peter, my boda-boda (motorcycle-taxi) driver, is Ugandan; for although the major businesses here all belong to government ministers and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ...”

“... attempt to understand, control and make money from risk. The best version of this story is told in Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods (1998), a fascinating account of risk, which makes the point that the study of risk is a humanist project, an attempt to abolish the idea of unknowable fate and replace it with the rational, quantifiable study of chance. The ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... very last executive orders signed by Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov’ – followed by a very long speech read at top speed by Gekhayev, repeating the list of successes in the style of a bureaucratic report. The speech concludes abruptly; immediately changing his bearing, smiling inanely, Gekhayev adds in a tone at once embarrassed and fawning: ‘You might be ...”

“... translation of Plutarch, marginal glosses are provided to assist the reader. At this point we read: ‘Cleopatra finely deceiveth Octavius Caesar, as though she desired to live.’ If we are willing to follow this cue, we instantly discover a more coherent reading: Cleopatra indeed makes a great show of rendering Caesar a complete account of her ...”

“... reader a sense of flatness and emptiness. It seemed all ready to be made into the play Yonadab, by Peter Shaffer, which accentuated the vacuum of style and gave it a purely theatrical emphasis. The real trouble, perhaps, was that Jacobson had seen all too clearly what a good story the rape of King David’s only daughter, by his eldest son, makes in the ...”

“... and hermetic speculations of a young writer who seems to have heeded Jack Spicer’s advice and read the weirdest stuff on which he could lay hands. There were no job offers from Chatto or Faber for this particular poet, but in the Sixties at least there were casual openings in the East London labour market: cutting municipal grass, packing cigars in ...”

“... we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show ...”