“... lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry ...”

“... inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil ...”

“... In large parts of the South blacks were kept from voting by intimidation and trick and murder. It may indicate the atmosphere if I tell you that the New York Times had great difficulty finding a lawyer in Alabama who would represent the paper in the Sullivan case. When one did agree to take the case, and he invited the Times’s New York lawyer down to ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... many visits . . . have I found anyone about.’ The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance. 6 April, Yorkshire. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather. There are sheep in the adjoining ...”

“... early in 1984. Assad lived just long enough to witness the total Israeli retreat from Lebanon in May 2000. He was probably the only Arab leader to earn America and Israel’s respect, having inflicted defeats on both. And he left a son to prolong his legacy. For the men who came to rule the United States with the inauguration of George W. Bush, the Syrian ...”

“... A little strange, that, I thought. But I said, ‘That’s where I’m going, so perhaps I may give you a lift?’ ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ And we got into the car and drove off. At first neither of us spoke. I was concerned with joining the stream of traffic in Lower Regent Street. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Are you ...”

“... could not be heard and putting his hand over her mouth. Fox News calls her a ‘loon’ (‘She may very well believe everything she’s saying. That is one of the signs of lunacy, believing something that isn’t real’); Senator Orrin Hatch says she is clearly ‘mixed up’; Donald Trump Jr tweets a crude drawing making fun of her; if the assault ‘was ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... that the office was lenient to the powerful. ‘Infamous’ sodomites were fewer in number but may have persisted throughout adulthood, pursuing relationships with other adults or taking the passive role. Rocke gives an average age for those men of 39 as opposed to 27, and they often remained unmarried. It is clear that Florence was unusual, though it’s ...”

“... time when talk of such things can seem fuelled only by machismo, vanity and vicious buffoonery. He may have been mistaken in his self-watching (though he’s more honest a writer than most) and mad with ambition, but it might also be said that he has kept watch over the Republic in ways too various, and too arresting, to be summarily dismissed. He has now, in ...”

“... look spineless in the face of Serb and Croat terror, has produced a subsidiary institution which may be the most important legacy of the war. In one way this is history repeating itself, for in 1945 it was US pressure that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal which sat at Nuremberg. During the Yalta Conference, Stalin proposed a toast ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... good children were given marzipan fruits while bad ones found their shoes filled with coal; on 1 May, the queenship of the Virgin Mary, bunches of lily of the valley were exchanged. Joan of Arc was one adoptive saint and heroine among many whose memory was kept with incense, flowers, singing and processions on her feast day, another spring festival since it ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and describ’d Things exactly as they ...”