“... are the claims made not only by those who run supermaxes but by army doctors, the Pentagon, White House lawyers, the Department of Justice and the president of the United States: ‘We do not torture.’ ‘Our practices are humane.’ ‘The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo.’ At Pelican Bay ...”

“... If​ universities had been an invention of the second half of the 20th century,’ Michael Dummett wondered in his last book, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010), ‘would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied?’ Dummett’s anxiety wasn’t whether philosophy could survive at a time when the value of a university education is gauged in increasingly reductive, economic terms ...”

“... edition, with a translation in similar rhythms opposite the Russian. Equally valuable are Michael Harari’s Russian plus English translation of the poems written between 1955 and 1959, published in the same paperback with Manya Harari’s translation of Pasternak’s Essay in Autobiography. As Craig Raine points out in a witty and penetrating ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

“... and a love story’. Opening Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes we read, inside the front cover, white on black in Barthes’s handwriting: Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman. What follows is text and pictures, a fractured autobiography, a dictionary of personal themes, arranged alphabetically. A fiction? Not ...”

“... publishing is in denial of diversity. A topic as basic as the creation of life is racialised: ‘white women believed that motherhood was both original and endlessly interesting; a form of cultural narcissism.’ At a commissioning meeting ‘two non-fiction debuts are given the green light with almost indecent eagerness – one, a book on new ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... the Crowd, and – an improbable-seeming name, perhaps, in this context – Menachem Begin’s White Nights. The self-excited, voyeuristic fervour of Norman Mailer’s reveries about crime and the nature of the criminal belong to another world entirely. Two final points. First: how foolish and dangerous it is, in thinking about the nature of the Soviet ...”

“... Fox, recently released from a long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank Sargeson, played by Martyn Sanderson. She lives and types in his garden shed, finishes a novel, and sends it off to a publisher he has recommended. The novel is accepted and Sargeson waves at the garden gate as Frame leaves ...”

“... New York’s youngest ever city councilman in 1991, using race-baiting tactics in a predominantly white district. He won Schumer’s congressional seat when Schumer ran for the Senate in 1998. In Washington he fell in line, and voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. He made a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for New York mayor in 2005, remembered ...”

“... project to Warner Brothers. The whole cringe-making story is told in The Man Who Heard Voices by Michael Bamberger (Gotham, 2006). He describes a painful supper at which Shyamalan joins a group of Disney executives: ‘What are you saying, Nina? What are you saying the script needs? Three weeks? Three months?’ Nina said nothing. Her face said: Not three ...”

“... Ofqual’s way of dealing with public opinion was to hire a PR firm run by former associates of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, in a contract awarded without a process of competitive tendering.When the A level results were published on 13 August, 39 per cent of teacher-predicted grades had been revised downwards. The resulting furore – including a ...”

“... the mistake of appearing to be America’s surrogate in Europe; he, at least, never fawned on the White House. Heath is the nearest thing This Blessed Plot has to a politician hero; apart from Roy Jenkins, the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill ...”

“... find the best.’ You are always alone with the oddness of modern consumption. Walking under the white lights of Sainsbury’s you find out just who you are. The reams of cartons, the pyramids of tins: there they stand on the miles of shelves, the story of how we live now. Cereal boxes look out at you with their breakfast-ready smiles, containing flakes of ...”