“... million). Firtash, we were told, is the Ukrainian oligarch who was at the centre of a series of major gas deals between Russia and Ukraine. Moscow allowed him to buy gas at below market rates and he sold it on high. The profits from this and other deals helped him finance the government of Viktor Yanukovych, whose kleptocratic rule was only stopped by way ...”

“... on constructing a myth of himself as both nobly born and destined to greatness. All three of his major works, the Vita nova (1295), the Convivio (1307) and the Commedia (1321), were, for their time, remarkably autobiographical. ‘Dante seems incapable of imagining a book in which his person, or at least a person bearing his name, doesn’t play a ...”

“... Association’. Clearly Pound’s parents ‘would take Jews as tenants’. All three of Pound’s major biographers begin with an evident and inevitable awareness that Pound’s is a stingingly complicated life. Moody’s is the fullest account likely to be written; his third volume, ominously subtitled The Tragic Years: 1939-72, goes beyond any predecessor ...”

“... the world without leaving home (the index to Stevens’s letters seems to include every major European country). An account of Stevens must be sensual, or it is nothing.I love a quatrain from Joseph Brodsky’s poem ‘Plato Elaborated’: ‘There would be a café in that city with a quite/decent blancmange, where, if I should ask why/we need the ...”

“... smoothly flowing alternatives could have been used.Galgut doesn’t observe the convention whereby major characters have privileged access to the narrative locus. Anyone can chip in. A homeless man with visions of supernatural beings (unconnected to the other characters) steers the narrative for several pages. It comes to seem as if the significant departure ...”

“... on a world at war’, Thompson shares space with some of her friends and rivals, particularly John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker and Vincent Sheean. Cohen is more interested in the personal lives of her subjects than in anything they wrote, an emphasis I found frustrating, even as I admired the stylishness of Cohen’s own writing. The broken ...”

“... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...”

“... an appropriate shaping in the materials, which merely follow a loose chronological sequence. The major events of Barbara Pym’s life were probably the acceptance of her first novel in 1950, the rejection of her seventh in 1963, and her ‘rediscovery’ in 1977. Appropriately, the latter or post-1950 part of the book is in the nature of excerpts from a ...”

“... ideal of beauty and the decorous sentiment to which Dickens was attached. Art reviews weren’t a major feature of Household Words, but on 13 September 1856 the leading contribution was an anonymous article written by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins and entitled ‘To think, or be thought for’. The pretext for the piece was a controversy in the ...”

“... of purpose are replaced by quantifiable results. ‘Goal displacement’ is also a major problem: where a metric is used to judge performance, energy will be diverted to trying to improve the scores at the expense of the activities for which the metric is supposed to be a proxy. As well as the likelihood of diminishing utility in terms of real ...”

“... innocent. A private marker placed in the Colfax cemetery in 1921 – at the tail end of the first major phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in ...”

“... Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed – and nothing more inimical to them – than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern ...”

“... way of saying "not yet” to somebody else.’ To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and On Representative Government – ‘both of which,’ Chakrabarty says, ‘proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.’ According to Mill, Indians or ...”

“... There’s no question that O’Connor was doing the latter. Gooch reports that when the poet John Crowe Ransom selected one of her stories to read aloud in Iowa, he substituted the word ‘negro’ for the slur. O’Connor complained that he’d ruined the story. ‘The people I was writing about would never use any other word.’That O’Connor had a ...”

“... justice: ‘Beckmann had no place in the advanced art world of the early 1980s – not one of the major modernist art historians ever reflected publicly on his art.’ This is true enough, and it took time for Kentridge to be appreciated too, but Koerner doesn’t reflect on why this was so. In his view, it seems, expressionistic ‘sketches of ...”