“... strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are re-colonised over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War Two, but our cultural colonisation by the United States was probably effective ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related in her 2010 memoir, Just Kids) a few quick shots one ...”

“... satires is the cartoon showing just two sombre figures, Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dr Richard Price. It was Price’s republican sermon ‘On the Love of Our Country’ that had given Burke the pretext for his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gillray entitled his double portrait Smelling out a Rat; – or – the Atheistical-Revolutionist ...”

“... regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put together.’ Little has changed. Antiquarian prejudice and ecclesiastical philistinism are in good shape, self-righteous as ever.Gavin Stamp was not ...”

“... Every hour I make scissor movements, bi­cycles, or stick my feet against the wall. To quicken it. When I do, a strange heat spreads like a flower somewhere at the base of my stomach. Purplish blue, rotten. Not painful, just before pain, an unfurling on all sides that hits against my hips and dies at the top of my thighs ...”

“... trial, massacre, impoverishment and exile. All for him to join the dictators’ club? For Wales, Richard, for Wales? Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, brought his children up with the illusion that he would win title to stolen ancestral property in Egypt. In pursuit of the elusive inheritance, Abdel Raouf, a mild man in a fez with oversize ...”

“... Reagan rightly called (imitating Star Wars again) ‘the evil empire’. The fall of the Berlin Wall and America’s Cold War victory – 200 years after the ratification of the United States Constitution – made 1989 the ‘brilliant climactic year of the American century’, a triumph extended into the next century by the Gulf War. Even the covert ...”

“... filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned toward the wall.’ Elementary lessons on geology, astronomy, physiology and numerous other fields were often prepared from the notes of public lectures delivered by professionals, as was the case with Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiology and John Tyndall’s ...”

“... for this Socialist. New Zealand meat imports to France have hit a damaging but invisible brick wall and their wool imports are being examined bale by bale before being allowed in: all this to force New Zealand to act ‘properly’ by breaking its own laws and letting Prieur and Mafart go. Mere elections will not change this. Indeed, as soon as the new ...”

“... in the early Seventies for what the Establishment called his bizarre and repulsive views on Richard Nixon and the 1972 Presidential campaign he constituted a real problem for the American press – specifically, those pundits, political tastemakers, and powerbrokers who lived within the pernicious confines of the Beltway that surrounds Washington. Doc ...”

“... German killed (elsewhere it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men ...”

“... case, and so: 4) The diversion of ‘law enforcement resources’ away from white-collar crime (Wall Street), narcotics and Mob activity to the war on terror has dealt a blow to law enforcement itself. Early episodes of The Wire make exactly that point. 5) The chances of a small nuclear device going off in a city of someone’s choosing are remote, despite ...”

“... complex. He and other civil servants of his generation, nurtured at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Wall Street and other playgrounds of the Wasp elite, took badly paid jobs in government out of a spirit of noblesse oblige. In the 1960s, however, they found themselves pushed aside by the ‘professional elite’: people, often from Jewish, Irish, Italian or ...”

“... Post. He was, or seemed to be, on the verge of authentic global tycoonship. Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle were proud ornaments of the Hollinger board. After the end of his first marriage in 1991 Black married Barbara Amiel, a right-wing journalist who had been born in London, moved to Canada as a teenager, and made a name for herself as a polemicist ...”