“... the general appeal of taking risks. ‘Like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class’, Dallek writes, he considered himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the ...”

“... view ourselves as actors presenting ourselves. So Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or an actor pretending to be that punchdrunk bum few ...”

“... of the explanation. On the one hand, the stifling parochialism and puritanism of an insular middle-class culture, with all its weight of boredom and repression, made escape abroad an instinctively attractive option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life ...”

“... soldier grew more extravagant from campaign to campaign, from Quebec through the Peninsular War, from Waterloo to the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the two world wars. In the Napoleonic Wars, Devine estimates, some 50,000 Highlanders were recruited from a region with a population of fewer than 300,000. Queen Victoria adored her Highland warriors, and so ...”

“... the pan-European world itself. Political regimes which had built their national logic on the Cold War discovered that the arrangements they had sustained for forty years now seemed pointless, to their voters and to the politicians themselves. Why in Italy have a system of coalitions built around a permanent Christian Democratic majority if there is no Cold ...”

“... chain-gangs and classrooms, of Alaskan lighthouses and Guatemalan churches, or of the US Army’s war against the Modoc Indian tribes. He photographed several multipartite panoramas of San Francisco. He also photographed spectacular arrangements of clouds. Finally, he devoted himself to the many eerily obsessive motion studies of animals, birds and persons ...”

“... figurative clinical idiom. ‘I see that I have been schizophrenic on the levels of nationality, class and culture,’ he wrote in his contribution to a 1969 symposium on ‘Strife and the Ulster Poet’. This language of schizophrenia feels dubious now, but it was common currency in the era of R.D. Laing. (In The Divided Self from 1960, Laing mentions in ...”

“... means both Catholic (read, if you like, ‘Roman Catholic’) and Protestant, and both working-class and middle-class. Mid-Ulster has a fifty-fifty religious split, and was for a long time extremely poor. Its unemployment was the worst in the province, at a time when the province’s unemployment was the worst in Western ...”

“... make what Hitler did ‘look like an evil child’s fumbling toys’.A prophetess, then, a high-class soothsayer? It’s true that Arendt quotes, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in particular, were conspicuous in the cheese dreams of the US media during the Trump presidency. Was it or wasn’t it totalitarian? Was he or wasn’t he a ...”

“... at least 500 photographs between 1910 and the 1950s – using the same ultra-primitive pre-World War One Kodak Folding Pocket Camera. Neither possessed sophisticated darkroom skills: they sent their negatives to professional processing laboratories on Jersey or else in London or Paris. The local jobbing men managed to produce some thrilling results (one ...”

“... veil has come to signify the unbreachable difference between the West and Islam. In the post-Cold War imagination it stands for so many things in so many different cultural contexts – Muslims, women’s rights, women’s oppression, tradition, beauty – that talk about the veil cannot be contained, because each domain of life and action seemingly ...”

“... and the politicians, too) are beset by powerful temptations. Spitzer must have known that high-class prostitution is very tempting to men who can afford it. Maybe that was one of the reasons he was zealous in prosecuting it. The fact that he succumbed to the temptation himself doesn’t undermine that position; if anything it reinforces it. It’s like an ...”

“... against it – begins with Teddy and Yvette’s wedding in Santa Barbara during the Second World War, and ends with Yvette’s funeral at the turn of the millennium. A narrative spanning nearly 60 years and more than 8000 miles (the distance from Rome to Hawaii), with half a dozen major characters whose various points of view are given more or less equal ...”

“... defense secretary Rubenstein holds sway) is in charge, where disabled veterans of the Venezuelan War, cut off from their benefits, live in LNWI (that’s ‘Low Net Worth Individual’) shantytowns that are just a hair’s breadth from open rebellion. Tanks patrol the airports, bearing signs that read ‘BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE OF ...”

“... hope in one’s churlish, outmoded way that the species will remain unfamiliar with global nuclear war, while recalling that the familiar for some people involves teaching disabled children and organising the low-paid. As Felski is aware, no word in the postmodern lexicon is placed in scare quotes more compulsively than ‘natural’. A suspicion of the ...”