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“... fit of imperial caprice. It was Leopold’s personal property, not Belgium’s. He never once set foot in it. He celebrated its establishment in 1885 at the Conference of Berlin by sitting on his throne while a group of Congolese children sang and danced for him. The voices of Leopold’s ‘children’ have been inaudible in even the most scathing histories ...”

“... taxation work? Or maybe class war? But without the Communist Party – of which Todd, grandson of Paul Nizan, was briefly a member in the 1960s – it’s not clear who would lead a struggle of this kind. Unless of course … And here it comes as no surprise to discover that the big incubations of the Front National, under Marine Le Pen’s father, took place ...”

“... them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked ...”

“... to keep Africans at home,’ Finkielkraut wrote, ‘rich countries are shooting themselves in the foot.’ But the fact that development aid has at times increased levels of migration has been known since the 1970s. The relevant question, as Benoît Bréville shot back in Le Monde diplomatique, is not whether development aid is reaching a country that many ...”

“... moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend of the diagnostic and the atmospheric, with the latter somehow complicating the former. Sometimes it’s a mock-heroic toying (‘O Who is trying to ...”

“... to (or at) an unidentified invisible presence in the back of the van. ‘Once you get your foot in the door,’ he swaggers, ‘you’ve got to keep it there.’ This exposition of method soon acquires a nastier tone. In Brixton, Barny informs us, 60 per cent of his calls are to Black customers. It wouldn’t be all that long before Enoch Powell was to ...”

“... bed-and-breakfast, farm tourism, go-kart tracks … Anything to weather the low points – BSE, foot-and-mouth – and survive in the narrow gap between rising input costs (fuel and fertiliser) and dwindling receipts: between 1998 and 2008 the farmers’ share of the price their food fetches at the supermarket checkout fell by 22 per cent.Scientists, policy ...”

“... pools and cinemas and state of the art gymnasia in which no uninvited civilian will ever set foot. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their ...”

“... since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an omnibus review of four books by Northrop Frye. ‘Notes on “Camp”’ transmits on an entirely different ...”

“... no appeal, the one ‘likeness’ guaranteed to show you looking the way you never want to look. Paul Fussell called it ‘the most egregious little modernism’, redolent of ‘the world of Prufrock and Joseph K and Malone’, and indeed every time my photo is scrutinised by a passport officer, it’s as if I’ve entered that same world of anxiety and ...”

“... MP and the owner of an Amsterdam pizzeria.Radoman wasn’t just a sailor. In the 2000s he became a foot soldier in the trade that shifts billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine from South America to Europe every year. Over the last two decades this business has increasingly come to be controlled by gangs from the Balkans, and is now dominated by ...”

“... in the role it allots to women, ‘chits of girls’ and ‘hussies’ must wait on her hand and foot, and only get grumbles for thanks. In a hard-pressed and resentful ending, the poet says (in literal translation) that she’ll do ‘anything just to keep this batty old woman quiet’. Carson makes his own feelings clear by rendering this, more ...”

“... far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy godmother, both shot by Tim Walker. From this side of the ...”

“... smoke you will rise into air Then a grave you will have in the clouds There one lies unconfined Paul Celan wrote in ‘Todesfuge’. These dead can generally be reburied only symbolically. Ashes are gathered from Eastern Europe’s death camps and newly interred under gravestones. At Père Lachaise they lie near the Mur des Fédérés, where the last of the ...”