“... 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 ...”

“... is for us to become psychotic. The Real is the McGuffin, the joker in the pack, the sign that means nothing but itself. Every signifying system, so Zizek claims, contains a kind of super-signifier whose function is just to point to the fact that the system can’t be totalised. It is that system’s point of internal fracture, marking the space where it ...”

“... of deferred repayments of an initial loan, calibrated according to income after university. But David Blunkett, the relevant minister at the time, decided that it should be imposed as an upfront charge, initially of £1000 per year. He also, in an equally ill-considered move, reduced maintenance grants. Most students felt worse off; most universities felt ...”

“... esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘peace process’, adding, however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.’ How then, given the means and possibilities of his assignment, does he hope to convey a truth of life in its physical and spiritual dimensions? The method is sometimes ostensive, close to a recitation of a catechism, simply asking, for example, ‘how it can be that a stone, a ...”

“... Given how busy he was, it would have taken some special prescience to think of this as his means of winning over the public, especially since many of them had little idea of what Twitter was even when he left office three years later. ‘During my time as an MP,’ he writes, ‘I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my ...”