“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... veering at times into wilfulness, continued undiminished until her death, 64 years later. By then she was Empress of India, and thanks to the carefully planned marriages of her nine children, the centre of a web of connections that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in ...”

“... Either/Or (‘I feel as a chessman must feel when the opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved’), his first from Macbeth: ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ The quotation is so familiar that when there’s a riff on the word ‘blood’, even two hundred pages later, it ...”

“... balance between fiction and reality’. ‘We live,’ he writes, in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It ...”

“... Im not​ as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave ...”

“... reply to the moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of Isis … And we should get on to much more important things and much bigger things.’ Then he promised to ...”

“... to ride’ with ‘my first vision of the liberal life’. The comedy is immediately underlined by his wry acknowledgment of how much larger he has grown in the interim (‘I further ask myself what my age could possibly have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later developments’). A much quoted passage from the second chapter of ...”

“... reviews, earthquakes, girlfriends/boyfriends: arguably all of these reduce potential sales, either by putting us off the work or simply by taking up our time or resources. If we’re going to ban downloading because it reduces potential sales, we could argue that sex should be banned on ...”

“... their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe. Some archives, like the Stasi files in Germany, stay open. Some open and then hurriedly close again when the political weather changes. Some are clutched tight by governments which only use ...”

“... of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky. During his schooldays in Monaco he was known as Cointreau-Whisky, and his poetry includes characters with equally peculiar monikers ...”

“... jury, referring to defence claims that Floyd had died because his heart was enlarged and weakened by drug abuse. ‘The truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr Chauvin’s heart was too small.’ ‘Policing is the most noble profession,’ the state prosecutor, Steve Schleicher, insisted.To ...”

“... Hotel by the Sea’ (1946) Three women,​ all in their way members of the higher bohemia, were having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage until his suicide in 1948 ...”

“... Polish and Jewish identities, the first being the one he chose, the second the one fixed on him by others, in particular other Poles. The dichotomy comes from Bauman’s own autobiographical reflections, ‘The Poles, the Jews and I: An Investigation into Whatever Made Me What I Am’, written in the 1980s not for publication but for his daughters. Wagner ...”

“... St Jerome in His Study’ (1474-75) by Antonello da Messina. Last March​ , in response to the pandemic and the confinement of daily life to the walls of my home, one of the pictures in my care as a curator at the National Gallery assumed a new significance: Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in Venice in the mid-1470s represents the early Christian saint in the nonpareil of home offices ...”

“... political and economic position. While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global ...”