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“... as educated non-Jews was the precondition of joining modern civilisation, and the most immediate means of desegregation. However, the passion of emancipated Jews for the national language and culture of the gentile countries in which they lived was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... Sasser and Paul Sarbanes; and, as an apparent afterthought, one of Bourke’s summer neighbours, David Rockefeller. Getting wind of the commercial initiative, the NIH offered Venter more power, more autonomy and even more money, and in the UK the Wellcome responded similarly in support of the Medical Research Council’s sequencing work. By this time, Venter ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil ...”

“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behaviour by covert means’. Under cross-examination he displayed a vagueness that for some recalled Jozsef Mindszenty’s show trial, shot through with a streak of paranoia: ‘I feel victimised … My name is selectively left on released documents where all or most others are ...”

“... gets to a defining concept in thinking about Kraftwerk is ‘retro-futurism’, by which he means a form of nostalgia for a ‘future that was never realised, or to put it another way, a future whose unfulfilled promises haunt the present’. This feels a bit retro itself – it’s almost exactly how ‘hauntology’ was posed on blogs written by Mark ...”

“... morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s ...”

“... book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out in 1982, he returned with even more pepper, lamenting Ellmann’s gullible readiness to accept what Kenner called ‘the Irish Fact’, meaning ‘anything they tell you in Ireland’. Kenner took Ellmann’s ...”

“... that of the ‘alf-bred beggars’ of life – although that social conditioning doesn’t by any means, to my feeling, limit the impact of the whole. The story is made for all human beings in a sense other than the merely social ‘betwixt and between’ – in Hamlet’s words, ‘crawling between heaven and earth’, granted hungers and aspirations hardly ...”

“... after speech at the assembly: we must work together. But what does this mean? Can the WHO be the means to marshal a collective global effort, or is it doomed to cloak the reality that, in fact, there is very little solidarity between nations? Trump’s intervention in May didn’t help the WHO, and American withdrawal from the organisation would be a hard ...”