“... in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the buttressing of a ...”

“... the vision it had when it came to power – that were manifestly failing those citizens, mainly black, who were most socially vulnerable. In fact, the writing had been on the wall for Calata since February 2014, when, following Zuma’s annual state of the nation address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of news, Jimi ...”

“... rebel and friendly pamphleteering rival of Defoe’s – described how two brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, who had fought at Sedgemoor, fled by sea but ‘were driven back again, and with the hazard of their lives got on shore (over dangerous rocks), where they saw the country filled with soldiers, and they being unwilling to fall into the hands of ...”

“... become a founding member of the secret, ultra-nationalist organisation Union or Death, a.k.a. the Black Hand. In 1913, he became head of the intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, a job that put him in a position to arrange to smuggle the weapons and ‘the boys’, as Clark calls them (Gavrilo Princip who fired the fatal shots, was a month shy of ...”

“... that the sampled other gets out of all this.There is a whole forest of ghosts here, corralled from Black music and worship. Eno’s original musical epiphany – the track that ‘blew my socks off’ – was Steve Reich’s ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (1965), in which Reich sampled and looped a Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter. Eno had also been ...”

“... for a ‘historic photo’. A military cameraman points his camera at the soldiers. But when the black and white photo appears on screen it isn’t the soldiers we see: it’s the puzzled group of Arab-Palestinian figures at the other end of the room, ordinary people, onlookers. They, and others like them, are central figures in the work of Hillel ...”

“... the telling itself has an inward, rather than an outward, orientation: the interior of Africa, the black heart of Kurtz. His comments on those novels (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes) where the political subject-matter is most concretely particularised are especially alert. Perhaps this suggests that Said is at his best with authors who offer equal scope ...”

“... of humanitarian crisis, much of urban Gaza has been turned into an uneven igneous landscape of black-grey mounds.In Israel the desire for retribution for the 7 October attack was widespread. But the Israeli army clearly knew much less about what was happening inside Gaza than it thought it did. If Israel had been blind to an assault so meticulously planned ...”

“... relationships with Carnegie Brothers and the steel companies Bethlehem and Midvale. The historian Benjamin Cooling has described the four decades before the First World War as ‘the birth of the US military-industrial complex’, and traces its characteristics – ‘kickbacks, cost overruns, favoured contractors, political interest in defence-related ...”

“... Virtue is achieved by the act of naming the virtuous. Beautiful slicks of Adorno and Walter Benjamin that don’t quite fit together (like the M25). You start to feel, convince yourself, that you’ve actually read these books. Passive absorption (Clinton style): the compulsory hallucination of living through those counterculture years. Watson’s early ...”

“... synaesthesia, his interest in birds), three short reminiscences by former pupils, Boulez, George Benjamin and Hill himself, and Loriod’s interview with Hill. Part Two consists of seven essays, of which three are on individual works: La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, Des canyons aux étoiles ... and the opera Saint François ...”

“... Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have learned this ...”

“... Bacon took her to a ‘bad street’, what she saw was a place ‘just crammed with people, mostly black people, walking on the sidewalks and sitting on the stoops and leaning out of the windows’. In the ‘good one’, by contrast, there was just a lone boy kicking a tyre into a gutter. ‘Ed, nobody’s here,’ she said to Bacon, according to Robert ...”

“... brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the Gainsborough portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman, the brewmaster, asset-stripped the operation and bought up surrounding acres in canny anticipation of future development packages, the coming world of retro frocks, Moroccan internet cafés and ‘plastinated’ freakshow corpse art by Gunther ...”

“... formally Penman’s book is exceptionally polite, with its aphorisms, its extended quotes from Benjamin and Barthes, its skipping hippety-hop between memoir, analysis and slogan. That the style is rather familiar is perhaps a measure of Penman’s influence. It’s a style he dismisses at one point as ‘the cult of the little and the lost, the sliver and ...”