“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... all ordinary occasions, even with regard to this life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsOn 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions ...”

“... in the mid-1960s, in order to construct large numbers of prefabricated flats at great speed – means the story is somewhat skewed. Some of the most complete modernist environments in the country, from Broadwater Farm to Chelmsley Wood, don’t feature, simply because they’re of little architectural worth. Harwood’s story will be familiar to anyone who ...”

“... Styling itself as a nationalist anti-drug paramilitary group, the BDC fought heroin use by any means necessary, sometimes reporting users to the police or turning in dealers, sometimes meting out popular justice.The BDC disintegrated, but one of Hassan’s spiritual protégés, a local nationalist called Douglas Moore, took up his cause in the mid-1970s on ...”

“... in my view, but that’s a topic for another day.)The head scientist at Nvidia was a man called David Kirk. As he told Witt,‘with parallel computing, it really took us a fair amount of convincing to talk Jensen into it … Same with CUDA. We really had to make the business case.’ But with AI, Huang experienced a Damascene epiphany. ‘He got it ...”

“... of opiate painkillers is perhaps the most ridiculous of them all. In 1989, a doctor named David Haddox developed a theory about opiates he called ‘pseudoaddiction’. The theory, which according to McGreal was based on the observation of a single cancer patient, said that if a patient was showing signs of tolerance and craving larger doses of an ...”

“... best overall consequences is shown to be wrong by the obvious impermissibility of using particular means like torture to achieve good ends. The conclusion would be that to allow good and bad outcomes always to determine right and wrong is an illusion, perhaps an illusion about what is demanded by rationality.Merely pitting the intuitions against each other ...”

“... were built by early Chinese states to keep out raiders, and by Europe’s medieval cities as a means to police access. In 1648 the treaties of Westphalia, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War in central Europe, established the principle that a state has sovereignty over a particular territory, drawn on a map, thus paving the way for the modern ...”