“... changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me. My responsibility to forms can’t be gracefully fulfilled. Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as dishevelled or depressing.To right away avoid being depressing, and because beginnings are important, I’ll begin with a poem ...”

“... can become more moderate when in power. Both views are misleading. While Meloni has proved to be shrewd on the national and the international stage, she is also operating in a country where the normalisation of the far right has been advancing for decades. Italy after the Second World War had a unique political landscape. It was home to both the most ...”

“... but Witbooi turned down all German offers of protection, insisting that local peoples should be allowed to deal with their own problems. When in 1886 he was approached by German emissaries sent by the colonial administrator, Heinrich Göring, he refused to negotiate with anyone but ...”

“... his conscience clean while others did the dirty work: it required determined resistance to war by means of direct action. Pacifism – as well as poetry – led him to Herbert Read, Britain’s most famous anarchist, and he absorbed many of Read’s ideas. The state became the primary target of his political critique. Drawing on psychoanalysis, he argued ...”

“... is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one’s fellow subalterns. I’m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been contemptible in schoolyard culture and I would remember if I’d done such a thing. For adults, it’s ...”

“... Indian civilisation that flourished from about 3300 to 1700 bce.To start with, the book seems to be a subtle culture-clash comedy. Satnam decides to stay on the farm while his parents return to London. This also allows him to avoid conflict with the London girlfriend he has dumped in a fairly cowardly way. It is a portrait, not unkind, of a beta male. He’s ...”

“... the latest world-heroic saga. While the climax, Soviet invasion, seems to have been replaced by General Jaruzelski’s quite unforeseen takeover, myth has already taken on the force of history, and two themes are now becoming established: that the ‘extremists’ in Solidarity overplayed their hands, thereby challenging the Soviet Union’s interest in ...”

“... points south as places of leisure and relaxation which for fifty weeks of the year can scarcely be said to exist at all. According to this view, the poetry associated with Mediterranean and Caribbean countries must always be off the literary map: one can expect very little from books with titles like The Fortunate ...”

“... empty. Then a Mayor of Rouen who was keen on statues discovered the original plaster cast – made by a Russian called Leopold Bernstamm – and the city council approved the making of a new image. Rouen bought itself a proper metal statue in 93 per cent copper and 7 per cent tin: the founders, Rudier of Châtillonsous-Bagneux, assert that such an alloy is ...”

“... The fascination exercised by the study of collaborationism on the historian (especially the Anglo-Saxon one) can be attributed partly to unfamiliarity with something outside the national experience, but, perhaps even more, to the sheer range of mutual personal situations involved ...”

“... October 1962 was not August 1914 because John Kennedy had learned the lessons of Munich, which may be summarised as follows: get angry in private, think before you speak, say what you want, make clear what you’re prepared to do, ignore bluster, repeat yourself as often as necessary and keep the pressure on. Where Kennedy learned the mixture of forbearance and resolution which lies at the heart of international peace and good marriages is a mystery; his mother and father were no better at solving problems than Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler ...”

“... must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind. On the other hand, such detachment might just as easily lead to indolence and indifference – ‘to one’s doing nothing at all’. Moreover, a coolness of attitude might put other ...”

“... he describes how his triumphant re-entry to the Commons as a commoner in October 1963 was spoilt by the ironical cheering of Tory MPs celebrating Lord Home’s appointment as premier, made possible only through Benn’s Act. This, he records,‘discomfited the Labour Members and confused the nature of the victory’. I am not sure it did confuse it. After ...”

“... Hymns to the Silence was his last double album: I wanna go out in the countryside Oh, sit by the clear cool crystal Water, get my spirit way back to the feeling Deep in my soul, I wanna feel Oh so close to the One, close to the One, Close to the One, close to the One And that’s why I keep on singin’ baby My hymns to the silence ... No one who ...”

“... the Cold War, the zenith of American intercontinental power, when dying colonialisms were replaced by a vast congeries of ‘new nations’. Thus, between 1919 and 1930 were born the modern – one might also say pre-Post-Modern – masters: Jack Goody (1919), Victor Turner (1920), Mary Douglas (1921), and Marshall Sahlins (1930). Right in the middle came ...”