“... in order to return to some imagined form of ‘lay reading’ or what he calls, after Deidre Lynch, ‘amateur envy’. He has an astringent chapter on the current forms taken by this temptation, which, as he shows, has a long history. The same strategy enables him to address from a fresh angle other well-worn topics, such as the need for the teaching of ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares; Borges became, among others, B. Suarez Lynch and H. Bustos Domecq; O’Brien’s real name was Brian Ó Nualláin and he also wrote under the name Myles na gCopaleen. All three of them at various times worked out strategies to present a fresh persona to the world as well as fiction in which they ...”

“... nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat ...”

“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

“... Some murders – and some murderers – seem to disrupt that order more than others. McFeely cites David Baldus’s massive 1985 study of almost 2500 cases prosecuted in Georgia in the 1970s, which showed some remarkable, if scarcely surprising, racial disparities. If the victim was white the death sentence was far more likely to be imposed than if the victim ...”

“... two largest US banks, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, are also being investigated, as is Merrill Lynch. Meanwhile, the ‘barons of bankruptcy’, as the Financial Times describes them – corporate insiders from the biggest 25 companies to go bust last year – reaped $3.3 billion from stock sales and compensation in the three years before their companies ...”