“... press. It amounted to: make a public confession that your god has failed, beat your breast and you may win the right to be taken seriously. No man who doesn’t think socialism equals Gulag should be listened to. It was no doubt a sincerely felt rhetorical figure in an anti-red polemic. Fortunately practice differed from theory. For most of us the image of ...”

“... articles censored, a cinema club closed down, a programme of debates banned. Now he thinks things may be looking up. He believes that what the regime most fears is a Tahrir Square, the idea of a public forum, an agora. ‘The Arab revolutions,’ he said, ‘were about men and women reclaiming public space in the heart of their capital cities.’ But what was ...”

“... wound than exile, and I suspect (perhaps because of my familiarity with Israeli society) that it may have deformed political discourse in Israel even more than the Nakba has deformed political discourse among Palestinians. A recent poll shows that the majority of Israelis conceive their national identity to be based on the Shoah, and the cynical exploitation ...”

“... to do.) Agamben’s subject is ‘bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’. This man is sacred in the antithetical sense of the word now all but lost to us, that is to say, accursed, at the mercy of all. Indeed, in the Roman social order homo sacer was the lowest of the low, yet as such he was ...”

“... that men like him ‘might become spiritually impoverished without fresh experiences’. Some may feel she has every right to the tantrums she throws, that her constant attention-seeking is not without justification, and that Herzog deserves to have his life made miserable by her. But Herzog is unapologetic. He imagines a friend reading the book and ...”

“... 12 Sept. Afternoon boating – Paula Becker – Rilke. 5.30 p.m. engaged.’ They married in May 1901, a month after Clara Westhoff married Rilke. ‘Autumn on the Moor’ (1895) by Otto Modersohn. Modersohn-Becker found it hard to get used to her new life in the peace of Worpswede, with a husband and small stepdaughter. On 30 March 1902, she wrote ...”

“... doing’, but doesn’t see that as a reason to stop. And there are hints that her purposes may be instrumental as well as altruistic; that she is using stubs to rehearse interventions that she intends to make in her own world too. The Future, to visitors from the past, looks like a utopia of comfort and ease, but it has come at immense cost: most life ...”

“... them?’ This explains Lydia’s childhood fondness for Choose Your Own Adventure books, which may or may not have been available in Mexico but were certainly popular among American children when Cummins and I were growing up. Writing a self-portrait and transposing it across a politically fraught border zone – in ...”

“... for it.’ How else to describe the certainty, the cutting elegance, of these formulations?Gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the Platonic ladder that leads to self-understanding … If marriage is, as Mill suggested, a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national ...”

“... according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it ...”

“... sermons addressed to the passions? Johnson: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.‘Bang!’ Beerbohm writes, ‘and the rabbit that had popped from its burrow was no more.’ He continues: Why hadn’t Boswell told us there was a clergyman present? … I suppose the clergyman was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the ...”

“... frescoes and pestilential air induce a feverish pleasure all the more delightful because it may be fatal. In Italian Hours, his 1909 collection of travel writing, James recalls a villa fallen into ruin, ‘walls tattered and befouled breast-high, dampness and decay striking in on your heart … these heavenly frescoes, mouldering there in their airy ...”

“... by Miroslav Holub, whom he greatly admires, and who can sound like this in English: Inside there may be growing An abandoned room, Bare walls, pale squares where pictures hung, a disconnected phone, feathers settling on the floor the encyclopedists have moved out and Dostoevsky never found the place Lost in a landscape Where only surgeons Write poems – a ...”

“... words, were intended to make ‘new thought . . . possible’. And this, paradoxically, may also be why he is so little studied or so infrequently involved as a participant in the parliament of ‘theory’. He was too inventive, too various. Far from making new thought possible, it sometimes feels as if Deleuze’s almost manic creation of concepts ...”

“... and thinks that she should go to medical school. When she points out that she is a black woman and may not be admitted, he promises to ‘argue the case in court’. The exchange is vastly anachronistic. This is the language of present-day aspiration, replete with conventionally upper-middle-class professions and a faith in the power of anti-discrimination ...”