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“... 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 ...”

“... with us or against us,’ one attendee texted me. The party was held at a former school in north-east Washington. Police and anti-Musk protesters stood on a square of grass outside. Inside, people wore T-shirts that said ‘Make AI open source again’ and necklaces that read ‘own your data’; one man had a Ron ...”

“... looked as if he was going to burst. He fled to lie on a beach with Arthur somewhere up the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal. I spoke to him there on his mobile phone. He was chortling with the sheer pleasure of getting away. When he was back I asked him about his sister-in-law. Oh, that’s sort of settled down, he said. The police have left her alone so ...”

“... head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide. The magazine Management Today has developed a distinctive style of portrait photography in recent years. Here is a constant stream of successful business figures, but here also is a problematic redundancy of appearance: how can one promote the ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”