“... an inspired prankster yells out: ‘Wai-ter.’ Charles Baudelaire had, it might be argued, a more authentic claim to the inky cloak and cosmic melancholy of the troubled prince than any other writer of the era. His much loved father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, died when he was only five, and for a blissful year or so he had his mother to himself. ‘I ...”

“... Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using ...”

“... art and commodification that Pop Art propounded. In an interview of 1977, around the time he more or less gave up his artistic career to devote himself to his two favourite recreations, smoking and reading novels, Brainard suggested it was probably the eclectic nature of his output that had saved him from developing into a brand name: I don’t have a ...”

“... understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered most vividly for the leering satyr eyebrows and pagan gusto of Jack Nicholson as the warlock Darryl Van Horne (the ...”

“... was replaced by General Brice Oligui Nguema: Omar and Ali Bongo had run the country for more than half a century. A radical impatience with older men presiding over younger men and women is a key to this upheaval, but France’s lingering postcolonial influence is decisive.Guinea is an outlier here: it broke with France at the end of the ...”

“... are four of his 18 chapters devoted to religion and theology? Brookes explains. Christianity was more fervent and theology more challenging after the Test Act was repealed. Does one detect the faint distaste of the historian for the social sciences? No mention of Keynes’s circus, a veil over anthropology after ...”

“... benefit. An ecologist might suspect that Cole’s theories and plans will prove to be outdated more rapidly than Cobbett’s pragmatic approach to the details of human life. Cobbett was a regimental sergeant-major before he was thirty and his politics and journalism carry the marks of this rank and profession. One of the characteristics is an awareness of ...”

“... fighting, did not know what was lost, did not indeed know that anything was lost. But who was the more tragic, or who was more damned – the man who knew it, or the man who did not?’ Some of us, forced into such a formulation, might conclude the former, but it is Dr P. who is Sacks’ choice. This is not just a personal ...”

“... the market order was a kind of nostalgia, bound to fail in practice. In reality, neoliberalism was more often dishonest, proclaiming its absolute adherence to the rule of the market, only to fall back on massive state intervention. The bank bailouts of 2008 were a case in point. Under modern conditions neoliberalism is, de facto, an anti-democratic ...”

“... rather than anything as orthodox or foreseeable as a ‘development’. And there’s nothing more fruitful than a timely mutation. The late Angela Carter once told me I was a ‘formalist’. We didn’t meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don’t smoke, and I cadged a ...”

“... his place in a long line of writers, calls the ‘last chief’ of the Comanches. It might be more accurate to call him the first chief, but that would diminish the mythological attraction. Quanah’s prominence in recent popular accounts owes as much to his being the half-breed child of a captive white woman as to his prowess as a war leader. The romance ...”

“... mountain left their houses. Carrying their household belongings and all the food they could find, more than eight hundred families set out one night in 1915 to climb Musa Dagh. On the plateau, they began to dig trenches, and to distribute the few firearms they had managed to hide from Turkish searches. Elsewhere, one and a half million Armenians were being ...”

“... De Doctrina Christiana is a vast, detailed record of his thought on the subject he considered more important than any other. He put an enormous amount of time and effort into this treatise: the sheer bulk of the manuscript and its intricate revisions establish that. He meant to publish it, but then the Restoration of 1660 put his revolutionary party on ...”

“... would have excised an occasional sentence as repetitious or otiose. But that would have had no more substantial effect than a craftsman’s final polishing. The monolith remains, in a sense beyond criticism, simply there, an Ayer’s Rock of scholarship. Most large books can safely be skipped through or skimmed, by all but the most conscientious reader. In ...”

“... There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live in the city and the greater the stray memories and associations you build up. Sometimes this sense of the city can be greatly added to by history and by books; sometimes, however, the past – I mean the distant past – and the books hardly matter, seem a strange irrelevance ...”