“... hacking at the News of the World collapsed. On 20 June, a few months after Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, News International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined ...”

“... not novelised philosophy but a philosophical novel: a work that analyses experience by literary means, presenting each of its moments as if it were self-contained. (Sartre dwelt on Camus’s use of the passé composé, which, he argued, treats experience as a congeries of isolated impressions, of the kind once proposed by ...”

“... claims that ‘there is no conclusive evidence to associate it with him.’ At a basic level this means that there is no contemporary or early ascription of the poem to Dunbar, a criterion for inclusion for all the 84 poems in her edition. But, to look at it another way, since the five surviving manuscript copies are all English, and Dunbar was not a ...”

“... patterns the acquisition of power on the accumulation of capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Cromer looked at Egypt and saw India, Rhodes looked at South Africa and saw the world. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ he said. So it is today: Afghanistan leads to ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... and rhetoric – has labelled his Egyptian counterpart ‘a fantastic guy’. In late 2015, David Cameron rolled out the red carpet for Sisi at Downing Street; Theresa May has promised ‘a new chapter in bilateral relations’ between the UK and Egypt. The IMF, meanwhile, is back to peddling unrealities of its own. The 2011 revolution erupted in part ...”

“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... memories of 6 January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s ...”

“... within the various [agencies]. This use of duplicate external service providers was often a means by which corruption was allowed to flourish.’ McKinsey South Africa also partnered with two Gupta front companies, Regiments Capital and Trillian Capital Partners, to secure contracts with Transnet and Eskom. In each case, Zupta functionaries in the ...”

“... make unlikely aesthetes and philosophers: the flattened affect displayed by Keir Dullea’s David Bowman in 2001 seems the more likely personality profile, or the slow psychological implosion of the cosmonauts in Solaris. But the characters in Orbital can’t leave the meaning of life alone. If Nell indicates the multidimensional field of view outside ...”

“... so stubbornly hostile to T.S. Eliot and to Modernism in general.Yet in reality his youth was by no means untroubled. The Sassoons were descended from the great Jewish merchants of Baghdad. Siegfried’s great-great-grandfather Sasson Ben Saleh was the last Prince of the Captivity at the Caliph’s court, and before moving to England the family had been the ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at ...”

“... Blackheath, the list of architects’ self-designed houses is long: Peter Moro, Brian Meeking, David Branch (whose elegant, Miesian case study-style house has now been demolished), Leo Rubinstein, Paul Tvrtkovic, Ray Smith and Ronald Coleman. Most of these were deadpan little houses, in brick with exposed concrete frames, often with small windows onto the ...”