“... Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930, some Soviet writers interpreted it as an act of protest: stifled by political censorship, he couldn’t go on. In the decades since, the suicide of the great poet of the Revolution has been seen as the Soviet Union’s point of no return. This is the view taken by the Swedish scholar Bengt ...”

“... the world through other people’s eyes, via fieldwork and cultural interpretation, and frequently by inhabiting a community over a number of years.Marx was no stranger to this dilemma. Co-opting Hegel’s language, he drew a distinction between people being a class ‘in themselves’, when they are seen to act in their objective material interests, and ...”

“... are two scenes that flare to life. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after the victory. This song seems to emerge from the collective mouth of the dead – the dead lying on the lawn of the ...”

“... spent time at any of the private colleges and universities in the US, you may have been struck by something mirage-like about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with ...”

“... was deliberately, even ostentatiously, low key. He wore his hair short, insisting that one could be shorn and still be a poet (it was also legitimate, he said, to pay your rent, sleep with your wife and, now and then, to write proper French). When, at thirty, he became bald, he rejoiced at being liberated from the company ...”

“... a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. At that time, they had been a presence in the country for about seventy years. The kingdom of Buganda became a British protectorate in 1884 and the territory was rapidly expanded to roughly the size of modern-day Uganda. In 1895 a ...”

“... luxury side of the journey (and its huge cost). What it isn’t any more is an adventure. Venice by train used to feel like Life, crossing the Channel and boarding the Paris train at Boulogne, getting a seat in the dining car before going round Paris on the ceinture and finding one’s sleeping car. It was an international train, headed, I think, for ...”

“... have been circulating for years. The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide. The physical infrastructure alone operates at a Promethean scale: a network of satellite monitoring facilities shielded by radomes stretching from Point Barrow on the Arctic ...”

“... at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. JSOC operators provided cover for oil tankers operated by US allies in the Gulf and for US installations in Lebanon, sabotaged petroleum facilities in Iran, invaded Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Afghanistan, and were the ‘tip of the spear’ in successive US punishments of Iraq. JSOC has classified budget line ...”

“... Sam​ Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) was one of the first British novels to be written in creolised English. It turned London, as the critic Susheila Nasta has said, into a ‘Black city of words’. The protagonist, Moses Aloetta, is an Afro-Trinidadian who arrived early in the Windrush era. After almost a decade in the city, he has become a reluctant welfare officer for newcomers: ‘All sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room … when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do ...”

“... and a funeral bouquet, a grotesque flirtation that proved prophetic. These two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of ...”

“... For Bois the memory is vivid to this day. There is the Brancusi studio donated to the French state by the Romanian sculptor, a room of Léger paintings, a huge ‘allover’ canvas by the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, a great Matisse cutout. Return visits confirm Bois in his desire to be an ...”

“... August 1873 and July 1876 (as part of a larger project that was never completed) are linked by his concern over the state of German culture after the victorious conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and the proclamation of the Reich at Versailles in January 1871. These Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, written while Nietzsche was Professor of Classical ...”

“... not on a business matter’ in a bonfire at his Gad’s Hill garden. What Kaplan ruefully implied by opening with the manuscript holocaust of 1860 was that there was a core of Dickens’s life which we would never know. Dickens laboured tirelessly to make himself publicly famous and at the same time to bury the private Dickens beyond all exhumation. He ...”

“... American Dream’, written in 1984, in which he deplores the perversion of American ideals by what he calls the ‘state philosophy of “entertainment” ’. As in his exploration of the German condition in Kings of the Road (1976) – where his pair of heroes are the son of a small-town printer and a travelling cinema engineer, intimates of past and ...”