“... devised by a collective that later called itself Gran Fury, and Schulman’s book is unusual for a self-described political history in treating ACT UP’s cultural production as indivisible from its other activities. Let the Record Show, which was installed in a display window at the New Museum in SoHo, invoked memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a ...”

“... stopping people from finding out God’s truth for themselves. In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it ...”

“... of Kagame’s entourage. Rwanda severed diplomatic ties with France. Much was written about the self-aggrandising investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, and about France’s hostility to the RPF regime. The Spanish judiciary, widening an investigation into the murder of some Spanish missionaries, reached even more grievous conclusions. In 2008, a ...”

“... of her career: the Autodidact of all Autodidacts. The quizzing was relentless. Had I read Robert Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at ...”

“... innovations that would spawn entirely new technology-based industries for the Boston region. A self-consciously hybrid creation, combining elements of research university, polytechnic and (last and least) liberal arts teaching college, MIT was not unique among 19th-century American institutions of higher education in combining such forms and purposes. In ...”

“... collective biography includes some lesser yet representative lights (the tub-thumping novelist Robert Hugh Benson) and excuses some glaring omissions (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Some of her choices do not come off. Siegfried Sassoon, whose writing had petered out before his conversion, adds little to the theme, while a chapter on Elizabeth Anscombe does not ...”

“... and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not ...”

“... Summaries of books read: The Interpretation of Dreams, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Self and Others. All incredibly tidy, with underlinings in red. And exploding flowers and nudie ladies stuck on the inside cover, as if in illustration of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which Carter would have been working on at the time. What ...”

“... all considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self-preservation.’ Civilised warfare obtained except when it didn’t. Whether what actually happened in the Valley or in other places was, by some abstract standard, merciless, pitiless and uncivilised seems a moot point. Contemporaries certainly thought that ...”

“... society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet ...”

“... or promissory notes that would go begging in their own country. The Axial Age launches a self-reinforcing pact of coin and sword. Payment of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that ...”

“... they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers ...”

“... about great players and great goals and great matches, but it is also about football as a tool for self-projection and for influence-peddling, about the role it has played in nation-building and about the role it increasingly plays as countries negotiate their positions in a globalised world’. West Germany’s half-apologetic victory in 1954, for ...”