“... sense of human futility and his dream-like obsession with punishment, noting that practical George Dance used the drawings when designing Newgate and that De Quincey, recalling Coleridge’s commentary on them, got the facts wrong but captured the spirit of the drawings, believing them to represent Piranesi’s dreams. ‘Thus the dreams of men engender ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be a triumph of that class which aims to make Germany the leader of the East against the West,’ Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘the leader ultimately of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world.’ There were already enough West-leaning Germans within Germany, Lippmann thought, to make it possible to amalgamate the country into the West if ...”

“... 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 ...”