“... schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, declared at the festivities. His father, Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s second founding father – would have agreed. When he took power at the ...”

“... symbols where none intended’? Does this mean that there are no symbols or that there are (or may be) symbols only where unintended? Given the active complicity of biography (as of psychoanalysis) in the tendency to regard sexual disclosure as the sine qua non of candour (perhaps what Knowlson obscurely hints at when in the Preface he says that his book ...”

“... and impoverished, his house a ‘shack’, dark except for the gleaming cockroaches. As the poet David Constantine pointed out in a discussion with Berger, ‘for the bulk of the poem’ Césaire is ‘not celebrating his country, he’s saying what a shit, awful place it is’. He saw himself as facing up to the reality of his underdeveloped homeland from ...”

“... the good manners and the talents of Madame Coswai’. They visited the studios of Jacques-Louis David and of Le Brun, whom Maria found ‘so obliging’ that, as she later confided to her diary, she was almost able to overlook her ‘weak, poor, cheap, common, badly drawn’ work. For her, the most consequential event of the French trip was her meeting with ...”

“... Shortly after the murder, Mahmoud Abbas declared Juliano a shaheed, a martyr. But though he may have given his life to the Palestinian cause, he was not killed by an Israeli bullet. The man who shot him was Palestinian, and probably from the camp: no one else would have known how to navigate those streets, or how to disappear so quickly. The killing ...”

“... was a deliberately experimental, avant-garde purchase of a pizza, for 10,000 bitcoin, made on 22 May 2010. (The community marks the anniversary of the first transaction by celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day. At current values, that pizza cost £2.77 million.) The first large-scale criminal application for bitcoin began life months later, early in 2011. Silk ...”

“... both of them, Madeleine as much as Francis. That they were religious and interested in mysticism may explain part of it, but the fact that they were old and made clear their loathing for Ireland’s pieties is also significant. They were warm and deeply engaged with the world and with each other. Many of us came away from their house inspired and cheered ...”

“... what is happening this moment, now; who manipulate the dread of a terrible future (and the future may always be terrible) to dull the sounds of freedom. Rosa Luxemburg was not one of them. Writing to Luise Kautsky on 24 November 1917 from Breslau prison, where she had been held because of her opposition to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to ...”

“... he moved to his mother, then contacted me to say he could come in, but –’‘I appreciate you may be having difficulties at home,’ the judge interrupted, addressing the defendant. ‘But the charge is of unlawfully having a weapon.’At issue was the question of whether the boy could stay on release pending his trial. The judge expressed concern about ...”

“... only TNT,’ Leijten said. ‘The postal system is sick.’ On the eve of my journey to Holland, David Simpson, the earnest Ulsterman who is Royal Mail’s chief spokesman, took me to one of the facilities the company is most proud of, the Gatwick mail centre in Sussex. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the nearby airport. It’s a giant mail ...”

“... for the body of the book; when he fails to make his thesis clear or his argument cogent, the fault may often lie, not in his thinking, but in the compression of his exposition. The current economics of publishing indeed create a crisis for scholarship. Perhaps, obsessed with present book prices, Bell has striven to pare his writing to the briefest ...”

“... he was rather a good waiter. Dressed in white he was OK.’ Some years later, in France (‘I may have a sadistic streak, I think’), he encouraged Clement to take a ride on a helter-skelter: ‘I was down below watching him go round, roaring with laughter at his fear and anger; he couldn’t get off he was in such a state.’ When Freud was in hospital ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap ...”

“... an uncomfortable argument. And yet, to have History (from 1973) rather than Notebook (from 1970) may be editorially correct, but it is the wrong choice. I treasure my battered copy of Notebook, with its sticker ‘5 fl. dump special’ – I bought it in Amsterdam some time in the 1980s. I should have bought half a dozen of them, shoaled like Gong albums or ...”