“... 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 ...”

“... structuralism, and not only because Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss worked together; Walter Benjamin’s thinking was often, perhaps always, inseparable from the turns his language took. Even the austere Adorno said that one could ‘hardly speak of aesthetic matters unaesthetically, devoid of resemblance to the subject matter’. I don’t think ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... selected prose, Harrison commemorates the ‘nicotine-stained digits of defiance’ of the actor Walter Sparrow, who as the chain-smoking ex-miner in Harrison’s film Prometheus delivers a scorching attack on the anti-smoking lobby:You just get t’first drag down your throat ’nSome bugger’s barking it’s verboten …There’s not one joy but what some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... musicologist friend, Billy. It’s not so much a marriage plot – Min is already married to George, a man so useless he ‘hasn’t got the larynx’ to deliver ‘Umm?’ convincingly – as a peg on which Tonks can hang Min’s longing for a less immediately stultifying life.Tonks is an aphoristic writer in the sense Susan Sontag meant it: ‘to write ...”

“... one-piece swimsuit at the beach, looking as if he’s quietly enjoying himself – a more winsome George Costanza. These memes are surely made by people who had to study Adorno at university. They will probably have read the depressive aphorisms of Minima Moralia and some fragments from Dialectic of Enlightenment on the ‘culture industry’; a few ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... own mayor in 1973, when Congress passed the Home Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political ...”

“... of the art world, and perhaps to see eggs chucked at the officials who gave prizes to Gilbert and George and at the critics who acclaimed Julian Schnabel, begin to wonder whether we might be mistaken for part of the congregation – or is it a rally? – and find ourselves having to kneel, or sing the National Anthem. The subject of art schools is ...”