“... at once over and underperform to an extent that other commodities do not. For Ngai, the gimmick may take the shape of an idea, technique or thing-like device, but is best understood as a performance: it is ‘both a wonder and a trick’, she argues, in a formulation which launches the book’s series of case studies. These are performances that elicit ...”

“... the age of plantation slavery there were ‘good banks’ and ‘bad banks’, and that Barclays may be identified as one of the ‘bad’ ones. But Barclays was neither unusually guilty nor unusually innocent. At the time, there was no such thing as a British bank that didn’t profit from slavery or have investments in human bondage in one form or ...”

“... and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too.The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As ...”

“... the most densely populated places on earth. Though it is part of the Marshall Islands, Marshallese may only live on Kwajalein with the permission of the US army. The relationship between Kwajalein and Ebeye mirrors South Africa’s apartheid pass system: Ebeye’s residents are allowed onto Kwajalein only to work and must leave every day after their shift ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Sixty years ago, on Sunday, 18 May 1941, Admiral Lutjens took the battleship Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy, out to sea from Gdynia in the Gulf of Danzig, along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. His mission was to sink as many ships of the vital Atlantic convoys as possible. He hoped to skirt the Norwegian coast, unseen, and filter through the Denmark Strait, north of Iceland ...”

“... rescued. Compared to the one and a half million children who died during the Holocaust, this may seem insignificant, but it was something. A similar plan was rejected by the US Congress.Things moved quickly. Within days of the vote, the BBC broadcast a call for foster homes and the Movement for the Care of Children (later renamed the Refugee Children’s ...”

“... the growing number of foreign-funded NGOs engaged in the promotion of ‘civil society’. There may also have been more shadowy forces at work. The late Greg Stephens, an operative with the US political consultancy Black, Manafort and Stone, exclaimed proudly at a meeting in London: ‘I did Georgia. $30 million. So cheap!’Saakashvili kept his ...”

“... in’ or ‘taking out’, as porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear, but that may be the point: like the two states that underlie them, these two strategies are bound up with each other. In this light his collecting was another way of being porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images and objects – that ...”

“... Diana, once the object of human adoration, but now only valued as a rarity, that by its high price may feed the grovelling pride of its possessor.’ Even today, the comments inscribed in the Visitors’ Book attest to the wildly different responses the house provokes – ranging from the naively enthusiastic (‘Amazing, could you design my house?’) to the ...”

“... and generally be a bit Nazi Megastructures and ‘Where’s his poppy?’ Left-of-centre academics may also be put off by traditional military history’s penchant for narrative and its beguiling mono-perspectives. In its purely operational and strategic guise, military history is often dull, amassing punishing quantities of trainspotterish detail. All this ...”

“... murder should have strong emotions behind them’. To lament the worsening of standards in murder may be perverse, but the indiscriminate killings that now darken news bulletins – teenage stabbings, or the destructive consequence of neglected mental illness, or squabbles over drugs – recall Orwell’s point. They are terrifying because they seem to have ...”

“... system of all opioids: not just the heroin that resulted in the overdose, but any methadone they may have taken. This means that the user often wakes up ‘rattling’ and angry at the people who helped them. At the centre, the first response to a heroin overdose is to administer oxygen. Often this is enough to bring people round, but if it isn’t, and ...”