“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

“... Varda met Fidel Castro in a little restaurant by the sea, where she asked him to sit in front of a rock that made it look like he had the wings of an angel. She was assisted by Sara Gómez, a trained ethnographer destined to become the first Cuban woman director. Working from a banc-titre – an animation stand with a mounted camera that held the lens ...”

“... Naples; and a decade since the first Aids fiction started to show up: Robert Ferro’s Second Son, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Allen Barnett’s beautiful The Body and Its Dangers. Today, as a result of political pressure as well as recognition of a growing gay readership, gay sections can be found in most bookshop chains, and independent gay ...”

“... brought back to Prague to have it amputated. We stared down from the battlements at the patch of rock and scrub where this fall might have ended. I have heard and read this elsewhere, but there is no evidence at all that it happened at Krivoklat. It is probably a refraction of what happened later, and fatally, at another castle; alternatively, it is part of ...”

“... They pimp-roll down Brick Lane, past the stencilled graffiti, the guerrilla ads for big-label rock groups, the torn political posters (‘Is Rap Music Calling Violence?’ ‘Is Another World Possible?’). They jeer at strangers (‘I cut you with my samurai, fuckin’ muthafucka’), cry ‘woah’ at the sight of girls in short skirts, and snigger as ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”

“... It was interesting to see how he parried with some notion of himself as a public figure, as a rock star really, when all the activists I’ve ever known tend to see themselves as marginal and possibly eccentric figures. Assange referred a number of times to the fact that people were in love with him, but I couldn’t see the coolness, the charisma he took ...”

“... for the rate of upthrust and a further theory for the erosive effect of this climate on that rock. Piketty sets r against g without establishing why either should be what it is. Still, the analogy with geology is flawed. Plate tectonics and climate are independent variables, as the rate of return and the growth rate are not, though Piketty treats them ...”

“... the house. Her room was covered in broken glass, her clothes were all over the floor, there was a rock lying on the floor, but nothing had been taken. The postal police asked if they were sure that nothing had been stolen, and Knox told them that they hadn’t checked Kercher’s room because the door was locked. Romanelli said that Kercher never locked her ...”

“... flanked the road as I continued west, then huge tilted plateaus surged out of the ground like rock tsunamis.Deadwood, high in the Black Hills, was off-season, chilly and a bit desolate. Slot machines winked in the empty hotel lobbies and restored saloons. Giant silver motorcycles stood in darkened storefront windows. Harley Davidson holds a huge rally ...”

“... is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties.’ I heard Colonel David Hackworth say: ‘Hey diddle diddle, it’s straight up the middle!’ I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95 per cent of the Iraqi casualties were ‘military-age males’. I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: ‘On one stretch of highway ...”

“... making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night ...”

“... do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their work.But it’s also, David Runciman reckons on his Talking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt’s life, which is why Ken Krimstein’s comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine’s ‘Three Escapes’. Arendt did not arrive in the US until ...”

“... production and circulation within the dominant formation. And studying TV commercials or films or rock music or political speeches rather than a ‘traditional’ literary canon does little in and to itself to effect any social change. That sort of ‘territory shift’ doesn’t mean we’re now playing for bug stakes ... It just means we’re playing for ...”

“... and Perret has dug up important new material. MacArthur was born in a dusty US Army post at Little Rock, Arkansas, on 26 January 1880. His first memory, he often said, was ‘the sound of bugles’. The MacArthur clan were not, as he often hinted, fierce Highland warriors; his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then ...”