“... or not her Stalin statue had a thigh for her to press her cheek against. It’s about whether she may have submitted a bit too readily to Anglo-American publishing imperatives that want stories of far-off places served with a spoonful of kitsch. The opening sentence of Wild Swans (‘At the age of fifteen, my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord ...”

“... known as ‘rockets’, moving in a single direction with no prospect of a return journey.Museveni may have opened the door, but the constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group. Schedule 3 of the constitution included a list of ‘indigenous’ tribes. By this ...”

“... trail is the mosque.The annual festival at the shrine traditionally takes place on a Thursday in May, but is often banned by the local authorities. When I visited in 2010, the festival had been permitted and Uyghurs from Kashgar, Khotan and further afield were desperate to attend. Worshippers began the long trek from a car park at the edge of the ...”

“... listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.The ...”

“... liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When Manchette began writing crime novels in the late 1960s, the polar (a slangy truncation of roman policier) was a straightforward procedural, spiced up with tales of small-time gangster lowlife. He took ...”

“... confronted in the 19th century remain [oh dear ...] those of the 20th century ... Thoughtful men may reject the cures he recommended, but we ignore his diagnosis at our peril.’ The essay itself, the most interesting of the four, describes and assesses three kinds of history: the ‘monumental’ or heroic, the antiquarian and the critical. The main butts ...”

“... relation with the young darling of the Soviet establishment, and he had to escape from him, as he may later have felt the need to cut himself off from Mandelstam. But the poems are very much more remarkable than the prose. Apart from his magic Zhivago poems, which can sound like an improbable cross between an inspired Nineties Symbolist and an Old Testament ...”

“... or even chemical. Different kinds of scholars looking at crop failure in the Soviet Union may focus on its political repercussions, on what it means for the world economy, or for global climate changes, or for the ecology of Northern Europe and Asia. ‘Everything is political’ only means that to do an adequate political analysis you cannot neglect ...”

“... None of the Chilean intellectuals I spoke to had a good word to say about Pinochet, though a few may have supported, at least tacitly, the idea of military intervention as a means to restore a workable democracy. What divides them is not their attitude to Pinochet, but their attitude to Allende. In this regard, I suspect, those who remained in Chile are by ...”

“... that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden may have ordered himself to follow the syllabic protocols of writing for music, but his opera translations apart, there is far more to his libretti than simple adherence to the criteria of singability. In an essay from Moving into Aquarius written when The ...”

“... as he says, ‘whether capitalism is not final, and nation-states fated to become nominal’. He may be right. Nations, as states, have lost most of their room for manoeuvre in the transnationalisation of finance and investment that now affects them all. In the European Community, and in future imitations of that association elsewhere, nation-states will ...”

“... fall within that 10 per cent that is pathogenic. A ‘natural’ process that feels abnormal and may turn out to be so, labour provokes the unease and resentment of a story whose protagonist may turn out to be a victim. Our consumerist, scandal-sensitised, anti-institutional sensibility fights powerlessness with ...”

“... been otherwise, given the topic, the author, the historical situation. One’s editorial finger may occasionally itch for a blue pencil, but one’s readerly eye wants to remark, to annotate, to remember and reflect on the literally thousands of insights into the relation of culture and imperialism that this book offers. Culture and Imperialism provides a ...”

“... landed gentry, the element in the Party which she later came most powerfully to despise. She may not have inherited a private income, but she married an alternative to it. Financially she belonged to the leisured classes.’ It is entirely characteristic that her memoirs make no mention of this awkward fact. Instead, we get class-conscious denunciations ...”