“... just to read it, but to ‘Join the many. Join the Empowered.’ The missionary tone is underlined by Naomi Klein’s blurb – ‘inspiring’ – and a frisson added by the book’s appearance: a brown paper wrapping like those used to discourage porn thieves and customs inspectors. Trembling fingers that go further are ...”

“... of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march. Whether the idea is the triumph of the working class or of a master race, ideology leads to the graveyard. Although liberal-minded ...”

“... Mireille Rosello that the official commemoration was also a form of erasure.Césaire can seem to be caught between worlds. For the politically minded, he is suspiciously literary and obscure. In literary circles he can appear too political – he was the only significant modernist figure to have a long and successful career as an elected official. Césaire ...”

“... 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. ‘Annihilated’ might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present. Its distance from us – the way its cadence and logic seem to shrug aside the possibility of a future anything like ours – is transfixing. Its arguments are mostly disproved, its certainties ...”

“... to Paris ended, Steele claims to have been appointed head of the MI6 Russia desk in London. By 2009, he had resigned and founded a business intelligence consultancy called Orbis with Chris Burrows, who was also on the leaked list.In its first few years, Orbis kept a low profile in London’s crowded field of private intelligence companies. That changed ...”

“... of women artists in its regular ‘Retrospect of Fine Arts’: ‘In an age so generally marked by the frivolity and dissipation of our women of rank, the few who by the cultivation of the fine arts emancipate themselves from these fashionable fetters, and display the elegance and taste so fascinating in the female ...”

“... the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from recycled mobile phone waste and is roughly the size of a ceremonial mask designed to fit a human head. Tshibwabwa was an artist in residence at the museum in 2022 and his work is now part of ...”

“... Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions ...”

“... under a conservatorship, a legal arrangement in which every aspect of her life was controlled by her father. She couldn’t spend her own money, drive her own car, write a cheque, change her setlist, get a manicure, take vitamins for her hair, remove her IUD or drink coffee. Jamie Spears had the power to enter his daughter into new contracts, make medical ...”

“... but the truth – as far as that is possible. I have no wish to say that popular biography cannot be truthful. I merely point to the paradox that the popular biographer himself does not know if he is being truthful, unless somebody else has, not sketched a character, but done the hard graft of long and patient factual investigation into the circumstances and ...”

“... court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might ...”

“... was only mentioned once. He finds this ‘a curious omission’, since comfort should surely be central to architecture – like justice to law or health to medicine. The point is a strong one, and Professor Rybczynski duly piles it on. Bitterly deprived by his own education, he can only write from a position of ...”

“... and a cor anglais is singing above muted strings. This tender melody reminds me of a mawkish novel by Josef Skvorecky. The details elude me, but I fancy Dvořák in Love to have been a soft-focus, rural idyll, and I fall to imagining a red sun rising behind a field of gently rippling Bohemian corn, and, beyond it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning ...”

“... the Parliamentary Deputy who was briefly in charge of the anti-corruption committee, is quoted by Kampfner as saying that Russia is a ‘mafia-controlled state’. Even more chilling is a flat news item put out in January 1992 by the Tass-Krim Press and reproduced ...”

“... that,’ says Hamm to Clov in Endgame. This is sometimes taken as a summary of what is alleged to be the distinctively bleak Beckettian world-view, but for it even to be a starter in this role, one would have to figure out what it means. For, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell observed, the meaning(s) will vary according to ...”