“... demography and production, is over a thousand pages in its English edition. They were to be followed by two sequels: one concerned with French politics, culture and society, the other with external relations. This quartet on ‘Identity’ was then to be completed with two ...”

“... famous as a historian for extraordinary discoveries about popular belief, and what was taken by its persecutors to be witchcraft, in the early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a ...”

“... On the occasion of the publication of a reader of her work by Duke University Press and of this essay, Paul Myerscough interviewed Jacqueline Rose in front of an audience at the London Review Bookshop. An audio recording of the interview can be found here. We live in revolutionary times ...”

“... a UK tabloid ran a contemptuous article claiming that the majority of Belgians weren’t proud to be Belgian, and that surveys revealed Belgians to be the world’s least patriotic people. Statistics like these make me proud to be Belgian, but they also miss the point, because Belgium is ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... big leader to livestream a message to the virtual World Health Assembly on 18 May was supposed to be Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa and chairman of the African Union, but something went wrong with the feed. Xi Jinping went first instead. We saw the president of China seated behind a highly polished table, in front of a mural showing rosy dawn ...”

“... wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the next day: ‘No mail. Who am I? Why should a poet be a novelist? Why not?’ Then, in late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her ...”

“... American Immigration Reform, says the administration ‘doesn’t want the detention experience to be Club Med’.*On any given day there are at least 50,000 adults being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centres; at least 20,000 held by Customs and Border Protection, and between 11,000 and 14,000 ...”

“... On 12 September, Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief of Tyco International – and described by Business Week as ‘perhaps the most aggressive dealmaker in corporate America’ – was put under arrest, charged with fraudulently obtaining over $400 million by selling Tyco shares while concealing information from ...”

“... a martyr. But though he may have given his life to the Palestinian cause, he was not killed by an Israeli bullet. The man who shot him was Palestinian, and probably from the camp: no one else would have known how to navigate those streets, or how to disappear so quickly. The killing appeared to be a message from ...”

“... was a perversity. The coloniser and the colonised were locked together – and constructed – by a fatal dialectic. There could be no reciprocity, only war between the two, until the latter achieved freedom. The pursuit of freedom lies at the heart of Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, an immense new volume of ...”

“... is what students of currency call ‘fiat’ money, money whose value has been willed into being by the state. The value of fiat money is an act of faith. There are quirks to this. In the case of the pound coin, if we ask how much it’s worth, the answer is obvious: a pound is worth a pound. It shouldn’t ...”

“... anecdotes or fond reminiscences. Black List, Section H had been published the previous year by Southern Illinois University Press. It was the only book by Francis Stuart in any Dublin bookshop. Because it had come from America, it cost much more than a normal hardback. Slowly, over the next year or so, I met people ...”

“... indignant, defiant and, in respect of the Ukrainian troops fighting at the front, gnawed by guilt. An aspect of that defiance, and a source of guilt, is the refusal to renounce comfort or pleasure. The greatest source of resilience against the shock, anxiety and grief of invasion, Tatyana Li, a psychotherapist in Kyiv, told me, is the universal ...”

“... mirror’. Chris Guthrie, the heroine of Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair, does this five times, by Murray’s reckoning, in Sunset Song (1932), six times in Cloud Howe, published the next year, and eight times in Grey Granite, which appeared a year after that. None of the students owned up to the habit, ‘although women’s bedrooms are surely warmer now ...”