“... Fernandez’s fifteenth birthday cake, which was all there was to eat, a sort of pudding made of white beans, solid and indigestible, imperfectly baked in an improvised haybox oven since the gas was off. In 1946 Liliane remarried. Angelo Tasca, an Italian journalist, was as high-minded as she was, but much more in touch with the pleasure principle. As ...”

“... Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting ...”

“... in fear from ‘the cops’, or wealthy A-list celebrities? Or are they, as Black women in a white man’s world, both? Do they really want anyone but each other? Do they own the house through which they strut? The song mocks its listeners and viewers for yearning for these superior beings in their state of limitless desire. At the same time, its sly ...”

“... station he is offered beer, ‘as though the officers hope to hide their helplessness beneath that white foam’. There’s a hint of pre-existing tension within the couple, an insignificant falling-out. Kunicki examines his wife’s possessions, and failing to extract any information, documents them obsessively: he starts taking pictures with her camera, each ...”

“... pre-conference skirmishers were all on the left. The hardly well-kept secret leaked out that Peter Mokaba, the fiery head of the youth section, had had a career as a police informer. Mokaba has become so prominent that it would be embarrassing for the ANC leadership to admit to this, so we suddenly found him cropping up at Mandela’s side to welcome ...”

“... Canute-ism. But neither in Rhodesia nor in Algeria was there the slightest sign that the minority white regimes would give way to anything less than overwhelming violence: indeed, all means short of that were tried – and failed. But neither the FLN nor ZANLA could hope to take on the conventional military force of their opponents on anything like equal ...”

“... coup. But over the years, leaked and declassified US documents, as well as many books, among them Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File (2003), have shown Nixon and Kissinger’s fingerprints everywhere. Kissinger has his defenders, but by arguing for his acquittal on technicalities, they often make the old man look guiltier. The historian Mark Falcoff, in an ...”

“... not compromised national security. (The documents that make this case – one originating from the White House – are themselves classified, and Manning’s lawyer has already subpoenaed some of them.) Even so there are reasons for Assange to be cautious. Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a written ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim Busch, president of the conservative Napa Institute in California, told the Times. ‘We need someone who can teach clearly and be strong.’ When it came to the cardinals’ vote, Erdo’s case could not have ...”

“... at UCLA with several of the anthropologists on whose work he draws, including Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst; the university was also home to such scholars as Marija Gimbutas and Carlo Ginzburg, who had found shamanic traces in the archaeology and folklore of prehistoric and medieval Europe.This new turn displaced armchair ethnography with ...”

“... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...”

“... perfectly normal people – people from all over, people from the North, people from the South, white people, black people, people with proper jobs and people who had just left school, but not, on the whole, rich or middle-class people. Not professionals. We were just enthusiastic amateurs, people from small towns who thought we could change the world but ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... not, but she thinks it anyway. I drive to her flat, navigating by map and mobile. She is wearing a white tracksuit. She has painted the walls of her flat an apricot colour. She leaves the door open. We can see the trees swaying in the wind. When I come in, Blair is speaking on Al Jazeera. I stand next to the screen, relieved that she will now see I don’t ...”