“... of life and death; and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards ...”

“... the Hitler-Stalin Pact in the following historical sense. He knows that the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky had warned Washington of growing Moscow-Berlin rapprochement (though he does not connect this to the Munich sellout) and he runs the whole development together by saying: ‘Time ran out. When Hitler and Stalin made the pact to which Krivitsky ...”

“... Prynne’. Virtue is achieved by the act of naming the virtuous. Beautiful slicks of Adorno and Walter Benjamin that don’t quite fit together (like the M25). You start to feel, convince yourself, that you’ve actually read these books. Passive absorption (Clinton style): the compulsory hallucination of living through those counterculture ...”

“... again’, and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences ...”

“... fide complots as arms for hostages, the secret bombing of Cambodia, or the entente between IT&T, George Bush’s CIA and the Chilean military, which sprang that latter-day Demosthenes Augusto Pinochet Ugarte into office. As LaRouche rightly notes, Marcuse had done the state some service, and he knew it. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that his ...”

“... it is the Congressional Record (unless it is not) we know that John Gey, or Grey, is in fact Dr George O. Gey, though his wife Margaret (though perhaps she was called Mary, who is to say?) has gone the way of all female scientific flesh. The citation ends: ‘I sincerely hope her name will also be immortalised as one of courage, hope and strength, and that ...”

“... immediacy become not only pleasurable pursuits but ethical ones (as they were for Walter Pater): alertness in life, to works of art, to weather, or to one’s friends, has its formal equivalent in the shifts of attention and enjambment that are found throughout the work: Yes, it’s necessary, I’ll do what you say, put everything aside but ...”

“... that they were merely being compensated rather than corrupted. As the anti-Union politician George Lockhart of Carnwath remarked, the Equivalent was ‘the cleanliest Way of bribing a Nation, to undo themselves; and alas! It had the design’d Effect.’ Daniel Defoe, working in Edinburgh as an English spy, noticed how easily the Equivalent ...”

“... She recalled Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 candidacy for president, Geraldine Ferraro’s selection as Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984 and her own nomination in 2016. The 2016 convention in Philadelphia ended with images of a shattered glass ceiling, a victory declared too soon. Jubilant as the convention in Chicago was, the party is more circumspect ...”

“... or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in the ...”

“... monster, in which the … sickness and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.’ George Kennan, the least sentimental of American diplomats, echoed Fanon, describing America as ‘a prehistoric monster’ with a ‘brain the size of a pin’. Yet even Fanon, who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on ...”

“... two Corinne Day photographs (one of Kate again) and some earlier monochrome prints, including George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 Modern Mariners Put out to Sea, of two androgynous swimmers on a diving board, the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a ...”

“... the fight against the insurgents in most of the country by the end of 2005. I heard General George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, say: ‘We should be able to take some fairly substantial reductions in the size of our forces.’ I heard that the insurgents had been driven out of the cities and into the desert and that they were ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... plinths in a psychosexual romance of heavy cloaks, gas masks, boots and belts. I think of Walter Owen’s strange First World War fantasy, The Cross of Carl (1931), in which underground trains shunt still conscious corpses from the trenches to industrial units, where they will be rendered into meat. Silver rails out of the capital double as telegraph ...”