“... producing a more diffuse cultural logic. This is manifest in the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, where the ‘big data’ mentality of capturing every biographical detail over time is elevated to an artform. This cultural epoch introduces a distinct set of problems. Which event from the past will pop up next? How can a ...”

“... critics of America, who figure that they are unlikely to be assassinated in the vicinity of Wall Street and Rockefeller Centre. In 2006, Hugo Chávez delivered free heating oil to the South Bronx and ostentatiously paid off the debts of Hispanic NGOs in the city. For Castro in the 1960s, Harlem was a useful place to expose American injustice. He made a ...”

“... it is as if Shakespeare at the time of The Tempest had been forced by an old contract to rewrite Richard III.) One way out of this quandary – for it does not feel right to historians that the golden years of the High Renaissance should leave behind such a central, equivocal instance of ‘progress’ – has been to doubt that what we see in London is ...”

“... an ‘almost manic system of walls and moats’. The perimeter of the estate was marked by a high wall designed to bounce back traffic noise, and to allow for oblique views through it, but which made the site seem heavily fortified. Garages were sunk into a ‘moat’, giving the building the appearance of a medieval keep, a besieged island successfully ...”

“... whom he had few nice things to say, and his impressionable, mentally unstable younger brother, Richard, about whom Parker has turned up new material – much of which also makes one think badly of Isherwood. With his family disowned, he formed what would be his longest – and wholly asexual – friendship at Repton, with Edward Upward. Close and ...”

“... of the orthodox neoconservative faction who once co-wrote an article with John McCain in the Wall Street Journal claiming that the overthrow of Gaddafi would lead to ‘a democratic and pro-American Libya’. Rubio is preoccupied with schemes to destabilise Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. As late as 2022 he was criticising Trump’s ‘unfortunate’ praise of ...”

“... enthusiast who handled Venezuela policy under the first Trump administration, recently told the Wall Street Journal that Venezuela is ‘a perfect storm, it’s everything the Trump administration is concerned about’. Under Trump’s second administration the issue of Venezuela has brought together those pushing for a militarised anti-drug strategy, those ...”

“... say, to feeling angry, hurt or silly. Is this impossible? Miller is ambivalent. He reports Richard Rorty’s view that there is, in spite of all the supposedly unfathomable differences between cultures, at least one social-psychological universal: ‘the humiliatability of human kind’. At the same time, he writes of those who are ...”

“... Indeed, it seems to me that at the Tate many of the late paintings look as if they are Medieval wall-paintings. Since everything they are contradicts the aesthetics of the easel-painting tradition, to say that they look like frescos here is to say that here they come into their own. That consummation, by the way, has nothing to impede it when they are ...”

“... is what we would call ideology which comes between the world outside and the shadows on the cavern wall. For Ricoeur, the utopian strategy can be the only possible escape – if escape it is – from the hermeneutical circle since, unlike the flight to science, it presupposes no ‘transcendent onlooker’, no place outside the circle, although Ricoeur, in ...”

“... party who was born to privilege, who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the ...”

“... we are back with the daily papers. One bright interlude, ‘a curious reprise to the past’, is Richard Nixon’s consultation with Malraux before the President’s departure for China in 1972 (a voyage of discovery code-named ‘Polo II’). ‘Mr President,’ Malraux declared, ‘you operate within a rational framework, but Mao does not. There is ...”

“... Partnership was repudiated, and a few hours later Trump ordered the construction of the promised wall with Mexico; an absolute ban was issued on immigration from seven Islamic countries, and a warning given to American ‘sanctuary cities’: if they refused to co-operate with plans for the detention of undocumented immigrants, they would lose federal ...”

“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”