“... it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge, so the North American doctors felt obliged to cure Göring of his dependency before allowing him to stand before the court.The phrasing makes it seem as if Burroughs was involved in the process, highly unlikely given that he was living in New York after being discharged ...”

“... be circumnavigated by the simple device of describing a bar as a ‘private members’ club’. Paul Raymond, patron of the Revuebar, was so determined to give his club an air of respectability that he appointed a Church of England chaplain and played the national anthem after shows.But Raymond and his fellow club owners were also prepared to pay the fines ...”

“... in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.’ Attali quotes Paul Lafargue’s comment that they ‘realised in our own day an ideal of friendship depicted by the poets of antiquity’. Unusual, certainly, but possibly explicable more mundanely by their being compatriots in a foreign city. Marx and Engels were ‘public ...”

“... that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ‘seemed almost like a ...”

“... compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, or the overthrow of Salvador Allende? To his credit, Kennan understood that most definitions of reality were rooted in emotions and beliefs that might or might not match up with facts on the ground. Kennan’s own emotions and beliefs created a ...”

“... 15 apaches and found they were covered in tattoos – among them, images of the Boer leader, Paul Kruger. Apaches, as Luc Sante explains in The Other Paris, were propelled to fame by imaginative fin-de-siècle journalists and pamphleteers who felt the city was at risk from ‘an army of crime’. The cause of the arrests, and the sudden celebrity of the ...”

“... world citizen after death, with one half of me going down the Vltava into the Labe and on into the North Sea, and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.’ As with the narrator of Dancing Lessons and his ‘tiny black cloud’, Ditie has expanded into the realms of geography. He has fulfilled, ridiculously, the ...”

“... Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the ...”

“... she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out existential crisis: the one currently being endured by the Labour Party.What makes Jeremy Corbyn a complex political figure, rather in spite of himself, is that he is both too ...”

“... Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed form. Nor has it been confined to the South: the North has had its own, scarcely less virulent form of white supremacy. The struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew ...”

“... to the war in Indochina with an under-reported version of the Algerian conflict raging in the north: aerial bombardment, villagisation (compulsory resettlement), new pro-French militias; harsh interrogations, disappeared prisoners, public executions; and the hounding of exile enemies, one of whom – Félix Moumié, a follower of Um Nyobé – was ...”

“... in pain. Even with a brief book, I was coming up about 40,000 words short. I asked to review Paul Chaloner’s lively and informative This Is Esports because I’d been brooding on these questions during lockdown.* My idea was that by thinking about the emerging field of digital sports, I’d find an interesting story and also clarify my thinking about ...”

“... Black liberation made its world-historical debut in August 1791 when ten thousand slaves in the north of Saint-Domingue rose up and laid waste to sugar plantations. Within three months, the numbers involved in the insurrection had grown eightfold. Sugar production almost ceased. Fortunes burned. Planters fled, and some were killed. By 1794, the rebels had ...”

“... been brought to tears by the poverty he was shown in Easterhouse, a postwar housing scheme on the north-eastern edge of Glasgow. But that was then. Now there was a credit crunch to pay for. Bank bailouts had pushed private sector liabilities onto the public balance sheet; Tory ministers blamed the debt on Labour’s spending while in government on a bloated ...”

“... rope the length of the shaft cost the equivalent of £700, more than three months’ wages. The North West province, where Khuma and Stilfontein are located, has an unemployment rate of more than 50 per cent.There was silence for three days, then, just before midday on 22 November, a new rope came down the shaft. This time, it held light sticks, a camera ...”