“... front of Le Champ de choux, and I have no doubt he thought the risk worth running. This is what it took to put painting in touch.‘Putting painting in touch’. This leads to the difficult – metaphysical – phrase that one witness has Cézanne producing later in life: ‘Je vois, par taches.’ ‘I see in touches – patches – dabs – stains.’ Or I ...”

“... practised. The story might have ended there. Instead, 38 state legislatures provided what they took to be a rationale for executing some and not other criminals. Finally, in 1976, a case went up to the Supreme Court – from Georgia – testing whether states had, in principle, succeeded in providing such a rationale. Specifically, the question in the case ...”

“... A sumptuously filthy blonde, and a brunette we called “The Princess” on whose humanity I took off as if flying a plane or riding a horse.’ He also wrote about his love for a prostitute called Luz: ‘I tell you, I really loved that Luz: she was so playful with me and behaved with such ingenuous indecency. She was like a cathedral and also like a ...”

“... opposite but its dark underbelly. Liberal democracies have always relied on brutality that took place out of sight – or at least out of mind. In the United States, democracy was considered compatible with slavery. Today, according to Mbembe, the ‘most accomplished form of necropower is the … colonial occupation of Palestine’. In Gaza, even ...”

“... make it wonderfully and hand it over to her neighbours.’ Munira could speak some Punjabi and she took Rania and the other women to Southall for piercing and waxing.‘I love you so much,’ Rania messaged her husband when he was away. ‘I miss that naughty little boy.’ Rania’s new friends thought it was odd for someone from her culture to be so openly ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”

“... in the world,’ Franklin-Wallis writes, ‘that give you a better view of humanity than a dump.’John Scanlan​’s The Idea of Waste reminds us that waste is a relative concept. By this he means partly that what looks like waste to one person – to you and me, say – might not look like waste to one of the waste-pickers at Ghazipur. But more ...”

“... At some time in the past the idea took hold that social justice was all about the state’s hoovering up resources and then blowing them at needy or deserving recipients. Some of these resources, money for example, were material, and others, like opportunities, were virtual. But there were various problems. One was that there had to be just one hoover, the state, sucking in goods, although other providers, being plural, threatened to disrupt the favoured distribution by shunting them around for purposes of their own ...”

“... noner this here milk,’ Randall said. Asbury continued to hold the glass out to him. ‘You took the cigarette,’ he said. ‘Take the milk. It’s not going to hurt my mother to lose two or three glasses of milk a day. We’ve got to think free if we want to live free!’ The other one had come up and was standing in the door. ‘Don’t want ...”

“... again with Scottish and English Protestants in Ulster under James I. None of the plantations fully took root: some of the Old English went native, and the ‘meer’ (or ‘wild’) indigenous Irish remained vigorous. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 resulted in the slaughter of Ulster Protestant settlers: in England, a figure of 300,000 dead quickly ...”

“... Germany. Bernhardt made a good deal of money out of these transactions, but it was Göring who took the lead in the exploitation of the Spanish economy. He was already commissioner for raw materials and foreign exchange, and on 18 October 1936 he became Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a new economic strategy designed to prepare the country ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”