“... 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 ...”

“... And he has produced a book which makes a moral claim of enormous importance today. Memory is a means of making loss survivable, and thus of allowing the past to have closure. More specifically, this is an attempt at ‘a new reference work in the domain of memory and feeling’, ‘a full memorial book to the Jewish children deported from France’. Born ...”

“... to throughout as ‘the Major’, a blinkered but liberal-minded Englishman of independent means made passive, bitter and melancholy by his experiences in the trenches. In 1919 he arrives at the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed owner, Edward. The Major’s relationship with Angela is largely ...”

“... a few minutes before he has to make the announcement, and the disarray of the judging process means that he can’t use either of his planned speeches but will have to improvise, cobbling them together somehow. This moment of public and media attention was exactly what he was looking forward to when he agreed to serve as chairman, and now it has turned ...”

“... his personal jeweller for two hundred wrist watches that flashed both cross of Jesus and star of David. Such personal touches were far more Elvis than any of the books that had been recommended to him. Soon life would again be games with lascivious starlets and golden guns and awesome dune buggies. Soon he would be home again and primed for every day’s ...”

“... form. Nor does it take the form of the boredom with self either – that great peerless theme of David Foster Wallace’s in his last book, The Pale King (2011).Q. Does anything happen in these books?A. Yes, but not where you think. Let’s first follow a certain consequence of itemisation to its conclusion. There are feelings and emotions in these volumes ...”

“... Intelligence chief, Bill Williams, who on returning to Oxford became an éminence, by no means grise, in academic politics, Hinsley became a notable committee man at Cambridge and a natural leader of the bien pensants. As a young fogey he was quick to scotch intemperate proposals for change and to argue that a particular reform was dangerous either ...”

“... Freud​ died in 2011 and the amount of first-hand information available about his antics means that Feaver could easily have written a book filled to the brim with gambling sprees and babies, as well as egocentricity, carelessness, fecklessness and an interest in danger. And while he has indeed filled his book to the brim with the excitement and ...”

“... favour of reality. Impending death is a factor, of course, and cannot be denied. But Adorno, who means to defend the rights of the aesthetic, is preoccupied with the formal law of Beethoven’s final compositional mode, a peculiar amalgam of subjectivity and convention, evident in such devices as ‘decorative trill sequences, cadences and ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... the horizon to guard against privateers and enemies. When they were within hailing distance (which means you could recognise a man you’d been sailing with for years, at least through a spyglass): ‘he who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the ...”