“... of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four. But, as sometimes ...”

“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... you read “In Defence of Convention T”?’ The very plainness of his name (often transmuted to David Donaldson) lent an aura of mystique to the plosive economy of the Davidson corpus. And the man himself, with his startling blue eyes and precisely articulated mode of speech, his unhurried confidence, his immersion in his own vision, his neatness, certainly ...”

“... something much deeper and blacker, that we all respected’. In an obituary of the sculptor David Smith he describes the good times they had and adds: ‘we both knew damned well the black abyss in each of us that the sun and the daughters’ skin and the bounty and the drink could alleviate but not begin to fill, a certain kind, I suppose of ...”

“... it is women’s woefully low representation in the top positions in our society that means they have become the load-bearers of austerity.’ Sonia Adesara, a doctor and ambassador for the organisation 50:50 Parliament, has argued that better representation for women is key to addressing the impact of austerity on women’s health: ‘What 50:50 ...”

“... whose motto is ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and when the Times says ‘all’, it means all. The book is, therefore, dense with names, places and dates. Mr Hersh tells us that he carried out more than a thousand interviews and I believe it. In some cases he interviewed the same person four or five times to make sure that he got it right. He ...”

“... the colonial wars of a later epoch’: Cromwell had recovered Ireland by similar means, but St Domingue was too far away. French ferocity compelled blacks and mulattos to join hands, and ended in the first and best-deserved defeat of the Corsican bandit, as he was called, sometimes deservedly, by Englishmen. It was also the first successful ...”

“... Oval Office: ‘Ed, how much money does the Federal Government put into MIT every year?’ Edward David didn’t have the exact sum to hand – it was in fact $105 million in 1972 – but Nixon was adamant: ‘I want it all cut off.’ In a dither, David scurried back to his office and phoned Nixon’s assistant John ...”

“... mean, as it would in conversation, ‘ingenious’, but ‘revenue-generating’. ‘Support’ means ‘cash-subsidy’. In other words, ‘we’ll flog everything that is not nailed down.’ The words in this document are less creative than the 11 full-plate pictures. These have been skilfully thematised by the designer Frances Salisbury ...”

“... to grasp their often unspoken assumptions. Even the more rigidly mechanistic ‘mind-set’ is a means of charting some part of a largely unknowable mental terrain. In politics such a ‘set’, far from being a hazy subjective notion, is often strikingly and repeatedly demonstrated. Most conspiracy theories are textbook examples of cognitive dissonance, in ...”

“... axiom that ‘socialism is about equality,’ he says is true, but only partly true. Equality is a means, not an end in itself. Without much more equality than we have at the moment, a large proportion of the population cannot enjoy freedom or liberty in any deep or meaningful sense. ‘The immediate intention of socialist policies,’ says Mr ...”

“... doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – that weird English scrap of parchment – in effect means parliamentary absolutism, a hasty 1689 transfer from the divine right of kings. We don’t have ‘inalienable rights’, but are allowed to vote and speak freely only because the government, through Parliament, generously lends some of its power to its ...”

“... We could start by wondering what ‘it’ was, before we even get to asking what ‘really’ means. And then there is Nietzsche’s remark that became a mantra in the days of deconstruction: ‘There are no facts, only interpretations.’ That seems pretty final, and designed to lead us badly astray. But Nietzsche turns out to be up to something more ...”

“... This creature inhabits a world in which hell is other intellectuals, a jungle in which ‘survival means killing, climbing means pulling someone else down and making your way means pushing someone else aside’; in which ‘everything is either a best-seller or a flop,’ in which ‘40 ...”

“... even the lack of jokes could be remedied as the text was ‘Ronniefied’. These were among the means by which British politics was ‘Maggiefied’. Likewise, as an author. Though she was lucky to get such a big advance for her apprentice manuscript – half a dozen of Martin Amis – she set about learning the tricks of the trade from those who knew ...”