“... that Melanie was to meet Freud’s disciple and colleague, Sandor Ferenczi. In about 1914, she read Freud’s paper on dreams (‘Uber den Traum’), realised that ‘that was what I was aiming at,’ and entered into analysis with Ferenczi. She attended the Fifth Congress of the International Psycho-Analytic Association in Budapest in 1918, and in 1919 ...”

“... and an opportunity which should keep it on the road for the lifetime of everyone likely to read this, and probably far beyond. The agents of the transformation will be, first, the Russian government and its as yet tentative entrepreneurs, and second, the Western businessmen now poking about in Moscow, fascinated, fearful and endlessly ...”

“... words to use and their choices can be idiosyncratic. After a patient is discharged the notes are read, often with some difficulty, by a ‘clinical coder’, a relatively low-paid member of the hospital administration whose job it is to match the doctor’s narrative against two lists of standard terms, the World Health Organisation’s International ...”

“... the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... can be something not just for right-wing agendas.’ He was followed by a woman who read a Howl-style poem about the injustices of Wal-Mart. The speakers mentioned Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, The Beatles. Dennis Kucinich, a small, birdlike man with strong views and sharp claws, the only candidate for the nomination who had voted ...”

“... More than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the ...”

“... through the apprehension of the people trying to secure power over the country.As preparation I read the last entry Dominic Cummings posted on his blog, from June 2019, just before he became Boris Johnson’s senior adviser – his main job, we assume, to win the next election for his boss’s new, Faragist Conservative Party as effectively as he managed ...”

“... fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first dress up as Superman. Gewen describes the absurdity of ...”

“... Samuels’. Then Tory rumours reached him of a potential conflict of interest scandal. One way to read it was as a case of insider dealing. The other way was that Marconi had got the contract only because Herbert Samuel was doing a favour to his fellow Jews, who were all in league to rip off the British taxpayer. Naturally, Belloc and Cecil pushed the second ...”

“... is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I prefer the word “pervert” to ...”

“... Michel Pastoureau. Now, as I stagger numbly round my house in San Francisco, hardly able to read or eat or think, I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. Too bad, because, in any normal time, the book would be one worth mulling over. Pastoureau argues that over the centuries stripes (and striped clothing) have gone from being ‘bad’ to ...”

“... which nobody would rationally prefer. The objection fails because it is not appropriate to read ‘can’ in the sense of ‘historically feasible’. Some of the more utopian aspects of Marxism should be rejected on the grounds that they are biologically impossible: it is pointless to condemn capitalism on the grounds that not everybody is a Leonardo ...”

“... Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the French. Chubby, chummy and balding, imperturbably good-humoured and everybody’s pal, Inglis has a distinct resemblance to Bob Hoskins, the interfering busybody and cheer-leader of the current British Telecom ads. He may ...”

“... I dipped again into my Wharton to see what was coming up on the next leg of the walk. ‘I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling, in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject.’Too ...”