“... jockeying for position and saving face. Any idea of an authentic self becomes a nonsense. You may or may not believe in what you are performing; either type of performance is believed in or it is not. There is, as Goffman repeatedly says, no real reality. Still, you wonder, what is it then in either actor or audience ...”

“... head, but there is no doubt that the new security agreement has strengthened him politically. It may be that, living in the heart of the Green Zone, Maliki has an exaggerated idea of what his government has achieved. In the Zone there is access to clean water and electricity while in the rest of Baghdad people get no more than three or four ...”

“... with which the Sri Lankan army rooted out the Tamil Tigers, regardless of the collateral damage.In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House, since he was challenging most of the assumptions on which the escalation of the war was ...”

“... no idea how to send a text. So Peter Mandelson wasn’t referring to them when he went on TV in May to press for the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, saying that figures were down due to competition from emails and texts.I spluttered into my tea when I heard him say that. ‘Figures are down.’ We hear that sentence almost every day at work when ...”

“... high price of petrol. There is an Isis-like massacre and an Islamic Brotherhood-like leader who may or may not have been involved. Nameless country-less refugees are being trucked to camps on the city’s outskirts. The narrator, Rasa, is an unmarried, frustrated, over-educated and under-employed Arab man-boy. By day he ...”

“... web is more than just an analogy; it’s evidence that this vast repository of doings and sayings may actually exist. On the soundtrack Kentridge wonders how to ‘undo, unsay, unremember’, make things ‘unhappen’ – a question, perhaps, about how to live with the endless dissemination of one’s life in the chamber of everything. We hear his voice ...”

“... brogues to Lady Diana’s Jimmy Choos – and the emerging picture of a disappearing Britain may be too intoxicating to resist. The islands that these people ruled over are no more, or no more what they were, and the fog of cursing and conspiracy that distinguishes The Crown is already proving a friendly place in which to experience the pomp of our ...”

“... that Pound-as-Propertius was criticising. This would have been news to Pound. The poem’s ‘I’ may flit between Pound in 1919 and Propertius in 20 bc, but the point of the ventriloquism was to get the reader in 1919 or 2016 to recognise their own ‘now’: to see how empires – Roman, British, capitalist – corrupt public taste and shrink ...”

“... Britain’s EU referendum was not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even so, the government may have reassured themselves that ‘leave’ carried more negative resonances than ‘remain’. Leave … and go where exactly? What kind of affirmation is leave? What kind of identity or vision does it assert? But among the many things unreckoned with by ...”

“... letters and Einhard’s work, Nelson invokes an account of a saint’s miracle that she believes may record Charlemagne’s memory of losing a milk tooth in 755, and legislation in which she suggests his distinctive voice can be heard. Sources on Charlemagne are available in relative abundance for an early medieval figure, and Nelson quotes frequently from ...”

“... return to defend his actions; instead, he is framed for theft, and put in prison.What happens next may be summarised as disaster ever after. Caleb breaks out of prison, but Falkland pursues him mercilessly, and the two are locked in the sort of relationship Fitzgerald describes as ‘rhythm without music’: escape and punishment, punishment and escape. When ...”

“... story of two sisters from 19th-century Manchester: Ally becomes a pioneering doctor in Cornwall; May dies tragically young in Scotland (Night Waking also includes a contemporary narrative about maternal stress and sleeplessness but is equally indebted to archival research). The Tidal Zone also has an historical underpinning, with interludes on the bombing of ...”

“... joke that ‘’tis the season to be jolly careful’ is better than he usually manages, but it may also be better than his actual policy if people interpret the rules loosely.A loose political interpretation of ‘the science’ we have allegedly been following is especially to be resisted. In marked contrast to the spring, Sage minutes are now published ...”

“... was shown that the new kind burned like a ‘raging inferno’. As many as eleven million people may now be living between combustible walls. Affected flats can’t be mortgaged without fire safety certificates, which leaves homeowners in a triple bind: their home is unsafe, they can’t leave it and they can’t afford to fix it. The government has insisted ...”

“... you have to multiply 2 by itself three times (2 x 2 x 2) to reach 8. The usefulness of this may not seem immediately obvious, but the benefit of logarithms is that they allow you to transform multiplication and division into the simpler operations addition and subtraction. Imagine you want to multiply 8 by 16. If you express these numbers as ...”