“... the impossible, an enigma forever eluding our grasp, one who communicates by hitherto unknown means: Is there an unwritable unknown poem that exceeds anything the technique of writing can do? We will never know. Maybe this is her triumph. She has taken her secret to the grave and will not give up the ghost. To arrive as if by telepathic electricity and ...”

“... but that she wasn’t influential enough. Her marginalisation in the course of the Cold War means she has no successor today: there is no one able to use anthropology as the basis for mass appeals to the public. The post-Vietnam generation never forgave Mead for co-operating with the government; it refused to recognise that she was trying to change ...”

“... trying to tell us what he thinks of us, to show his scorn for humanity, and he uses elephants as a means of expression, that’s all.’ Or perhaps elephants are ‘a mere political diversion’, a front for stirring up troubles like Britain’s in Kenya and France’s in Algeria? An embittered hunter insinuates that Morel is ‘undermining the good name of ...”

“... a crime, a jewellery heist, he has just read about in the newspaper. He doesn’t know what this means, but thinks he should tell the police.He doesn’t make it to the police station, and the scene of his death is a much cited moment in film history; Lang himself copied it in his late work The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). The man’s car stops at a ...”

“... teaching Marlowe and Austen in the day job and then also having a role in radical politics: it means treating one’s teaching and writing about Marlowe and Austen as a form of radical politics in itself. Guillory is severe on this particular form of professional self-delusion.These various forms of exaggeration are, fundamentally, expressions of a lack of ...”

“... gifted and respectable unfortunate with his endowment of strong and fine feelings, and the by no means apocryphal coiner, connoisseur and acter-out of lines like ‘Syne coup her o’er amang the creels.’ There are poems in which the opposing conducts are in some sense reconciled, and the epistolary mode may be thought to have encouraged a convergence: but ...”

“... known as Agenda 2010, that was introduced between 2003 and 2005. Its most notorious element is the means-tested basic welfare system known as Hartz IV, which four million German households rely on. The party that masterminded the changes and forced them through against popular protest was the SPD. Fifteen years later it is still struggling to come to terms ...”

“... shows in his indispensable guide to the politics of American security after 9/11, these are by no means merely ancient or academic formulations. While liberal critics claim that the Bush administration lied about or deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify going to war, the fact is that the administration and its allies were often ...”

“... I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later tiles round the altar are more faded and pleasing than the harsh reds and blues of ancient glass in the ...”

“... inscribed across the front of it, in Welsh-Indian runes: ‘Keep away. Especially surveyors. This means you.’ Unlike your usual look-at-me-mum magic-realist author, Pynchon pretty well never makes anything up. The ancient Welsh presence in North America, I am told, is now thoroughly established in archaeology, like the friendly visit from the Norsemen from ...”

“... from legal ownership as a transitional step towards socialism. In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means estimated that ‘perhaps two-thirds of the industrial wealth’ of the US was in the hands of large corporations controlled by their managers rather than their owners. This paved the way, they argued, for what we would now call a ‘stakeholder’ form of ...”

“... a therapy, it helps to distinguish the real you from the specious ones. And, of course, it’s by means of this distinction that you’re able to identify the good songs you wrote and the not-so-good songs, which is how you elect a song like ‘Strawberry Fields’ to the canon. It is by you and about you and about what you felt. What it has in common with ...”

“... him to turn his lectures into a book. At first he demurred, saying that his notes were ‘by no means ready for publication’, but relented when the editor – who had himself attended the lectures – offered to knock them into shape. ‘To refuse,’ Kojève said, would ‘amount to taking oneself seriously’. His Introduction à la lecture de Hegel ...”

“... law’ – or, as his compatriot the sociologist Ulrich Beck puts it, ‘Europeanisation means creating a new politics. It means entering as a player into the meta-power game, into the struggle to form the rules of a new global order. The catchphrase for the future might be: Move over America – Europe is ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”