“... a cartography of casual detail, whatever he wanted to notice in a drift across the city: ‘You read handbills catalogues posters singing aloud.’ The Shoreditch Town Hall zone is more wary: ‘No Dogs (Except Guide Dogs)’ and a cute little silver postbox placed at the right of the entrance to swallow cigarette stubs. Buzzed into the grand hall, the ...”

“... Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW ...”

“... million masks a day to the US. He received no response.The president says: ‘I learned a lot from Richard Nixon … I study history.’With the high rate of infections and deaths among Native Americans, Doctors without Borders is sending teams into the Navajo Nation, where healthcare is gravely inadequate. In South Dakota, the Cheyenne River Sioux set up ...”

“... DfE would lift the threat it had made to pull the plug on the charity’s funding. If you want to read Alam’s very thoughtful and interesting 2007 booklet, you won’t find it on the MCB website any more (you can find it, sandwiched between slabby redacted wodges, at the end of the Kershaw report). Since 1 September last year, Park View has had a new ...”

“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

“... the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, whose funding sources are a jealously guarded secret, Richard Walton, the retired head of counter-terrorism at the Metropolitan Police, accused XR of trying to break up ‘democracy and the British state’. In January, City of London police put XR on a list of groups said to have extremist ideologies; they were ...”

“... Satanic Verses came from sensitivity to the feelings of an audience that would never be tempted to read it. The charge was no less imposing for that; the book was said to cause an injury, a wound – the relevant claim is that wrong words or gestures can amount to aggressive misrepresentation or ‘misrecognition’. The Satanic Verses, in one of its multiple ...”

“... the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in the Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston – herself once a fixture in the New York art world – described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find ...”

“... most obsessions, this one took a while to get going. In my twenties, as a literature student, I read and acquired the obvious classics: Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse, Brittain, Fussell. But I had lots of other fads and hobbies going too: opera, Baroque painting, Kurosawa films, the Titanic, the Romanovs, trashy lesbian novels. Sometimes my ...”

“... James Doolittle to evaluate CIA operations. His Report, as the Church Commission notes, can be read as a brief for future CIA operations. It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do ...”

“... from the dead. Now, I can view the operation as a scientific fact; then, despite all that I had read on the subject, all that I had hoped for M.M., and all that Benjamin had said that evening, it seemed a miracle, and that sense of the miraculous was increased now a thousandfold by this dramatic presentation. Supposing he had said, ‘You know I was ...”

“... the New Yorker. (Kavanaugh had testified under oath that he first learned of the charges when he read the article.) An activist group, Demand Justice, compiles a list of 31 instances of perjury in Kavanaugh’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.More than 2600 law professors sign a letter stating that Kavanaugh ‘displayed a lack of judicial ...”

“... where Kim was half the time. But throughout the book, Martin paints Kim as his own man. Martin has read enough to get beyond the usual assumptions about the draconian nature of the two Kims’ rule. For example, purges were often not fatal or permanent. General Choe Gwang was up and down time and again: he was nearly executed during the Korean War for ...”

“... inspector who struck him in a wholly unsuccessful attempt to extract a confession from him. As I read the minority’s dissent, the Court of Appeal would, if satisfied that this incident had taken place, be bound to set him free. But I have to say that to me this is taking the ideology of due process too far. If that is the, or a, conclusion entailed by ...”

“... literacy, industrialisation, school systems, symbols and complex cultural artefacts. But it can be read along this other axis too. Underneath the accumulating paraphernalia of the modern lies a prolonged and massive social Calvary arising from the move from peasant subsistence to eventual urban interdependence. On that journey terrible accidents have been ...”