“... Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, published in 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels described what happened when sharks started attacking bathers off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. It was a wholly unexpected turn of events: sharks had never been seen that far north before. When lifeguards began ...”

“... to wooden carvings have long since been chased away, the state having realised that a prospering black market means little VAT is collected; all law and order has gone; the shopfronts are the same, but now there is just emptiness where people used to be; and the people you do see don’t just look ill, they look as though they are dying. In some ways ...”

“... and in Medea’s hand, arranging a tryst: ‘Look out, in the left aisle, for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose.’ Boundaries between fantasy and fact seem to dissolve, as the magnetism of the past frustrates the aspirations of the present. The narrators of these stories have their own projects – they are painters, musicians or writers ...”

“... during a Bolivian insurgency. In London, he helped run a new countercultural newspaper, the Black Dwarf, whose offices were ‘a regular port of call for visiting revolutionaries from all over the world’. During his teens, twenties and early thirties, he was considered such a troublemaker that the governments of Pakistan, Britain, France and the ...”

“... There was a lot of racial tension around bebop. Black men were going with fine, rich white bitches. They were all over these niggers out in public and the niggers were clean as a motherfucker and talking all kind of hip shit. Trane liked to ask all these motherfucking questions back then about what he should or shouldn’t play ...”

“... felt great regret.Parrots are a recurring feature of early European voyages to the Americas. When Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he didn’t spot any livestock – ‘neither sheep nor goats nor any other beast’ – but he did see wild parrots and was given some tame ones as a gift. Shortly afterwards, during his first journey along coastal ...”

“... for Schlegel and his friends. They discovered it in the tranquillity of the Moreel triptych, St Christopher in the stream bearing Christ, which they saw in the Musée Napoléon in Paris where it had been taken from Bruges. That was not the first time a work of his was made hostage to military action. Though Memling’s art might appear to be outside ...”

“... from now on’. It introduces a dimension of deception and charade – the ‘undertone of black farce’ that Bossy discerns in this whole episode – into his public cavortings as a magician and evangelist. In Bruno’s defence, one might say that the activities of the spy were less specialised, less marginalised, than they are now: put simply, a lot ...”

“... the medical pretensions of spas or with the derisive accounts by visitors like Tobias Smollett and Christopher Anstey. They are sober accounts of planning, financing and building, of the labours of improvement commissioners; they offer analyses of population and of the proportion of masters to servants, along with statistics of ...”

“... winter, and runs track in the summer. He dresses in the same way every day, in a pair of narrow black jeans and a crisp white shirt; he has his shirts professionally cleaned, a luxury he pays for with the money he earns working in a convenience store two evenings a week. In April 2004, Ahmad is two months away from leaving school. His grades are good enough ...”

“... Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ‘queasy’. Irving: My reply to him on air was, what a pity it is that we have to have blacks on the team and that they are better than our whites. Rampton: Why is that a pity? Irving: It is a pity because ...”

“... into the social standing of participants has also established the peasant element in the revolt. Christopher Dyer looked into the landholdings of almost fifty rebels from Essex, Hertfordshire and Suffolk. Of these no fewer than 44 held their land on unfavourable terms, including 38 who held it in villeinage. Dyer concluded that ‘there is nothing here to ...”

“... the summer to a special edition of his journal, Die Fackel, called ‘The End of the World in Black Magic’, and began to vivisect the war and its useful idiots (using their own words) in his encyclopedic and devastating play The Last Days of Mankind. It is telling that most of the critics Jasper cites ended up fleeing to neutral Switzerland (or being ...”

“... of salient information from internet noise through ‘deep dreaming’ (she riffs on the Christopher Nolan movie from 2010). Further, Steyerl urges us to marshal these skills in a new mode of interventionist interpretation, but it isn’t clear at what level it is to be conducted: ‘pattern recognition’ suggests it should occur on the noisy ...”

“... 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 ...”