“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... or directed or narrated by people with a background in business or an interest in business think. David Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky and the performance director of British Cycling – and therefore the man behind Britain’s eight gold medals in cycling at London 2012 and the Tour de France victories of Wiggins and Froome – studied sports ...”

“... enough to stay at home – but they won’t be poor either. Travel to Europe, by whatever means, will continue to be prohibitively costly for many. Smith’s response is that even the arrival of the more decently off in considerable numbers may be too much for Europe to bear, at least politically. The relation between capital and migration in Africa ...”

“... to emotion and personal belief’. This hardly seems up to the job: if that’s all the word means, the wonder is that we have waited so long for it. When has our understanding of public life not been shaped more by emotion than by ‘objective facts’? When was this golden age of objectivity? Surely not in the time when press lords such as Northcliffe ...”

“... Many readers will sense something odd about such reliance on a vision predating not only David Hume and Adam Smith, but Darwin, Freud, Marx and Durkheim, from an age when genes and the structure of human DNA were undreamt of. Can philosophy really be so timeless? The answer is plainly yes, provided a sufficiently passionate sermon can be extracted ...”

“... and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... wrought by Nayim’s unimaginable spontaneity, lobbing the ball from the half-way line clean over David Seaman’s head into the net to win the match for Zaragosa. In none of these cases is the beauty of the events lost when we revisit them. Indeed, one could well argue that it is only by revisiting the site of a moment of artistic inspiration that its beauty ...”

“... Committee in the Watergate office building. Nixon was never enthusiastic about using legal means to try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, or about getting Ellsberg convicted in a Federal court. He was, however, scared to death that Ellsberg had or was receiving more secret documents not just about previous Administrations ...”

“... He hates so much that he can’t begin to see what it is that the haters hate. Amis used to have a means of rebutting a vicious argument: a single rhetorical flourish, and the deed was done. In his memoir, Experience (2000), he says in passing of someone that he ‘has succumbed to the miserably trite belief system of schizophrenia. And it is a system, a ...”

“... interviews with neo-cons – on its website. It is an amazing piece. In it Adelman, Richard Perle, David Frum, all paid-up neo-cons, blame the following people for the Iraq disaster: George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, members of the National Security Council (‘not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were ...”

“... to squeeze inside other households. Charities and social entrepreneurs want to help, but their means are limited. As is becoming more and more common across the British state, help is only available when you’re in the middle of a crisis, not when you can see it coming. As I write this, squeaky little derivative phrases like ‘the struggle against ...”

“... you know’ really does seem to mean ‘write what you know,’ but ‘find your voice’ actually means ‘find someone else’s voice’: thus Styron ‘found his voice’ in Nat Turner, reimagining ‘authorship as a kind of ventriloquism … which is an offence against the rule of writing what you know’.McGurl never quite articulates the law that ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”