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“... describing his psychological state when he was in St-Tropez in the summer of 1904 (working with Paul Signac), ‘a man driven daily to the brink of desperation by inner tension, insomnia and the paralysing demons of frustration and self-doubt’. The certainties of neo-Impressionism, of Signac’s systematic development of Seurat’s ...”

“... calls are from picketing engineers seeking updates about which intersections they should cross on foot …   Patel is both trying to get the limos to their destination and coaching the picketers on how best to interrupt that progress. No ant-logic there, then. Rather a perfect model of deeply confused co-operation. All the same, I’m sure the ant-world ...”

“... debt at a speed never before achieved, and have built up debts never before seen in peacetime. The foot is on the floor and the needle is in the red. There’s no choice except to slow down – but nobody knows quite how to do it, because it’s never been done before. Put all these things together, and the state we’re in doesn’t look peachy. The imminence ...”

“... those low pentagonal stools on the sloping rubberised side of which the customer placed his or her foot, over which Aunty’s head would be reverently bent about to unlace the shoe. Coyly she looks up. ‘Have I,’ she says in those exaggeratedly correct tones of which she was so proud and which marked her out as a professional woman, ‘Have I the pleasure ...”

“... along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes – especially ...”

“... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not ...”

“... Yeltsin. The meetings went on like this for several days. We talked about Deconstruction, about Paul de Man, about ideological subversion and containment, about principles of selection and rejection, about the fortunes of systematic Marxist literary criticism, and so forth. There were some moments of illumination, but often the American editors seemed to be ...”

“... was a good little thing, she said, anxious to please. He polished her shoes and brought her little foot-stove in the morning, to warm her legs when she heaved out of bed. Simon was a heavy drinker, unpredictable and sometimes violent. His tuition seemed to consist in teaching the boy to sing Revolutionary songs and repeat coarse jokes about the three women ...”

“... group of international terrorism. Because now the terrorists, like other businessmen and corporate foot-soldiers, bond at white-water rafting sessions or convenient gymnasiums. For the moment, in the lethargy of future boasts and current frustrations, we join a straggle of flustered passengers carrying bags down a ditch between building sites. Red and white ...”

“... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...”

“... one day, he would preach the next. Towards the end of his sentence, the Bedfordshire justices sent Paul Cobb, a clerk of the peace, to obtain Bunyan’s submission. Had Bunyan been willing to sue for pardon and to admit that he had wrongfully convened the meeting at Lower Samsell, he would have been freed, but he refused. Bunyan told Cobb he was willing to ...”

“... chancellor Werner Faymann for help in receiving a large number of refugees making their way on foot along the highway from Budapest towards the Hungarian-Austrian border. ‘I sensed,’ Merkel writes, ‘that the time to make a decision had come. Unless Europe wanted … dead bodies on the highway, something had to happen.’ After hurried consultations ...”

“... to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human race has a common origin; Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, about the origins of ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence ...”