“... Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death ...”

“... This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’, who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too ‘polemical’ Selma Tawil brought the fifty-year-old keys into the room, sat down in her corner armchair and let them spill out of her hands onto the floor: heavy store-room keys, rusting cupboard keys, keys shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade ...”

“... undisputed facts. Stephen Lawrence was returning home on the night of 22 April 1993, accompanied by his friend Duwayne Brooks. They were waiting to catch a bus near the Well Hall Roundabout in Eltham, South London. A group of white youths ran across the road without warning. Stephen Lawrence was stabbed twice. Duwayne Brooks heard the remark ...”

“... An informal Times feature on literary classics, published recently, included a list drawn up by a director of Penguin Classics: ‘The 50 Greatest Classics (pre-1900).’ Such lists can be dispiriting, and it could be said of this one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long ...”

“... Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma. He told me that he felt ‘compelled to go down there’.In 1991, Andy’s older brother, Tony Harrison, a private in the Parachute Regiment stationed in Belfast, was shot dead ...”

“... The title of this novel comes from the Chinese national anthem: Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! With our very flesh and blood We will build a new Great Wall! China’s masses have met the day of danger. Indignation fills the hearts of all of our countrymen, Arise! Arise! Arise! Marcus Messner silently recites these lines, which he had learned by heart in grade school during the Second World War, as a way of enduring compulsory chapel at the small Ohio college where he had fled from a humbler establishment in his home town, Newark, New Jersey ...”

“... that suggest (or do they?) that those moral, metaphysical and historical aperçus are not to be trusted, that his narrator is in fact a pretentious and immature fantasist. The most obvious stylistic hangover from the first two books is Thirlwell’s stubbornly flat insistence on repeating elements of a sentence in close proximity, like Warhol ...”

“... they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under Tyrants. Everyone knows that democracies, though they clothe themselves ...”

“... The stately dome and columns of University College London are dominated by a bedsheet banner proclaiming its occupation and the grey stone is scrawled with coloured chalk: ‘Cut Out Cuts: Don’t Con-Dem Me!’ Inside, the campus has supposedly been put on lockdown. Guards in yellow jackets sit by hastily produced signs announcing ID checks ...”

“... no one keeps diaries anymore, implying that all the awful, fascinating detail of life is going to be lost. I suppressed an urge to tell him not to worry – I’d pay him special attention so at least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to ...”

“... actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. In 2006 Weissglass was just as frank about Israel’s policy towards Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants: ‘The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.’ He was not speaking ...”

“... of them. Lying on my back on Chip’s roof, all the memories of my childhood turned white one by one. Clune now teaches English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and has been clean for more than a decade. Accounts of addiction often begin with the first time – Burroughs started Junky with his first opiate experience, ‘during the ...”

“... Modern art​ was born into a market economy, and by the early 20th century it could no longer ignore its commodity status. While some artists sought to escape this condition through abstraction, say, others worked to underscore it with the readymade, an everyday product they simply nominated as an artwork. In its first incarnation, with Dada, this device was taken to be critical of the cultural-economic system in which it was enmeshed, but by the time of Pop such negativity had all but drained away ...”

“... under which Charlie Hebdo was published before it was forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of ...”

“... The​ Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore recently outed (or claimed to be outing) the writer of the Neapolitan novels concealed behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Has the press – or anyone else – any moral right to do this? Is an author’s identity an aspect of her personal privacy, to be disclosed or withheld as she chooses? Or is it information which belongs as much in the public domain as the books she writes? Anonymous and pseudonymous publication has a long history ...”