“... four 20th-century Chilean women convicted of murder, interrogating the way gender and class bias may have provoked their crimes and later shaped their public images. Her first novel, La Resta (2015, translated as The Remainder in 2018), involved a quest for the missing body of a dead mother through a Santiago in the throes of dictatorship and overflowing ...”

“... preferred smoke. The first room of Lacan: L’Exposition at the Pompidou-Metz (until 27 May), an extensive show dedicated to Lacan’s legacy in the visual arts, includes some captivating film of his infamous séminaires. Owlish behind spectacles, his leonine mane swept back, Lacan speaks in expressive, measured tones, a gnarled culebra, long gone ...”

“... Seu Jorge as the Marxist politician and guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella.‘The Secret Agent’ may refer to the fact that in 1970s Brazil ordinary citizens were forced to live undercover – that it was all too easy to become a secret agent in your own life. The phrase also has a cameo as the title of a film within the film. We see it come up in caps on a ...”

“... comforting in their vagueness: at least they made some comment on my obsession, for although grief may sometimes imagine that it wishes its privacy respected, in fact it senses insult when it is ignored. Replying brought a tiny, masturbatory release; the least welcome were those with a well-meaning postscript: ‘On no account, whatever you do, must you dream ...”

“... planning for the early summer has been postponed indefinitely by the onset of Covid-19. The virus may have changed the game, but not the preoccupations of environmentalists. To many, it presages the difficulties that climate change has in store for us; it will bring us to our senses, they hope, and force us into a massive salvage operation that protects our ...”

“... but even Manzoni is susceptible to the overly theatrical gesture, the rhetorical flourish that may have worked in his day but now strikes us as an exaggerated movement from the silent film era. Levi was not himself a great novelist; If Not Now, When? is his weakest work even if it was the most immediately successful. He was not a great writer of short ...”

“... for all to see. It seems likely that very early on certain newspaper execs – and Rusbridger may have been one of them – made a guess: soon enough, the paper part of newspapers would disappear altogether, and the money saved from having to print and distribute paper news would compensate for money lost from cover price. Like commercial TV ...”

“... is no. Anyone who thinks that it can has a moralistic view of reality. Anyone who thinks that good may impose itself on the world without struggle or the use of power is mistaken. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a ...”

“... past in silence Swifter (it seems) than the water’s passage. For certain ones what was written may come true: They shall live on in the distance At the mouths of rivers. For our ones, no. They will re-enter Dryness that was heaven on earth to them, Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay. For some, perhaps, the delta’s reed beds And cold bright-footed ...”

“... for my seed and their seed,    bring stones to shatter the blundering toes of my enemies, and may the heart of the sweating    evil man, seeping all that pig fat, fall so sudden with startle and dread,    never to rise again, never to rise ...”

“... of bread. I’ll bring a tape of Irish music to charm the ghosts beneath the ice. Some of you may act like Michiganders and cut holes to fish through, or slip through and swim underwater like the mad Finns of Minnesota – or maybe just make needle-holes of piss. And we might just find time for stories, the one about the team of horses that fell through ...”

“... you alright? Now are you sure you’re alright?’ the canal at the back, seedy as Xochimilco, the May air full of seeds, alder and plane and sycamore, generative fluff, myself fluffy and generative, wild-haired and with the taste of L. in my mouth, the office workers opposite very evidently pissing behind milk-glass, goslings and baby coots without the white ...”

“... of Axum or of Karnakit gets a mention of a line or twoin the architectural guide-bookwhich may well have been scraping the ...”

“... each day I pass through my field             up. And that it             may choose its             spot so freely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling             wingstrokes seeding             the fields of air, swoop. It feeds. There is no wasteland where the dead oak ...”

“... disease was driven to some more dangerous site, and that it eventually caused his death. The trick may have consisted in ‘putting his feet in cold water’, as reported by Mrs Thrale: a not unreasonable expedient, though unlikely to achieve much in the way of cure. The other mystery derives primarily from Johnson’s letter to Mrs Thrale of 1773, written in ...”