“... a new set of conditions as well as possible actions, relationships etc. This event’s name is May 1968. Those who single out today’s student demonstrators as backward-looking – as conservative – always make more or less explicit reference to ’68. In the aftermath of the CPE strikes this was all one read in the US press. Then, the story ...”

“... the burners and cowboys, and the pitiful nuggets of bullion dross scummed by the garimpeiros; they may seem like gleeful devils, but responsibility for their actions lies far higher up the chain. It extends into the darkness of the gallery: London’s smooth and level pavement was raised by the same infernal principles.At the centre of the maelstrom is a ...”

“... on a highway at night.In 1954, Johns destroyed all his earlier work – an act of erasure that may have been prompted by his meeting and developing a working partnership with Rauschenberg. In 1953, Rauschenberg had approached Willem de Kooning, the most celebrated painter in New York, and asked him for a drawing to erase. De Kooning gave him a piece that ...”

“... underwent brain surgery, or insulin coma therapy, or electroconvulsive therapy, or all three. He may have had seizures induced by injections of cardiazol. All these therapies were common in the hospital through the 1930s and 1940s, for illnesses as diverse as schizophrenia and epilepsy. In the film Abandoned Goods (directed by Edward Lawrenson and Pia ...”

“... nervous system of the poem and made the things around it shudder. In ‘The Armadillo’, Bishop may have implied a great deal about her own helplessness, but she managed also to suggest that such an implication might be both taken for granted and also fully taken in by the reader and felt. For Lowell, such an implication was precisely what he wished the ...”

“... rests on the presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people. This may seem a merely descriptive claim, but it carries with it extraordinary, and contradictory, consequences. First, the claim overcomes the distinction between Jews who are Zionist and Jews who are not, for example Jews in the diaspora for whom the homeland is not ...”

“... flask of wine by the sleeper’s bedside) and meeting petitioners on the outside of the building.I may be scoffing a bit at the wish for narrative here, but the essential division – into two groups of two – is surely reasonable. Infidelity and Disinganno are pictures of love in an outside world, where Nature has already largely overtaken a fallen ...”

“... May the world​ at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived,’ Salmen Gradowski wrote in a letter dated 6 September 1944, which he buried in a flask found near the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau after its liberation. His words supply the epigram for Nikolaus Wachsmann’s history of the concentration camps, KL – the Nazi abbreviation of Konzentrationslager ...”

“... Unqualified or low-skilled workers used to be valued for the things they did – work that may have exacted a physical toll, but might leave them enough mental space for the life they wanted to live outside of it. Now they are valued for emotional resilience, and the shortfall is left to Seroxat and Heineken. Would T. be happy to think that his ...”

“... with her friend and fellow feminist, the historian Sheila Rowbotham, and remonstrating with May Hobbs, the forceful and ambitious leader of the Cleaners’ Action Group: ‘They haven’t got the time to run their own branch, May, never mind their own union,’ Alexander says, and a little later she’s pulling coins ...”

“... research he has found nothing to suggest any involvement or foreknowledge on Johnson’s part. You may not believe this. But if you don’t, you won’t believe anything else, so best to stop reading.) It is the mismatch between Johnson’s fate prior to the assassination and his fate in its aftermath that gives this book, the fourth volume of Caro’s ...”

“... in Saigon throughout the war. It is here that O’Brien reveals his take on true facts. While they may be the best stepping stones to discovery and truth, they are, equally often, uncertain guides. The correct path depends on selection and choice. The selections we are provided with and the choices we make from them often lead us in the wrong direction, often ...”

“... he made Cardoso foreign minister. Soon he was captivated. Fernando Henrique – from this point we may drop the surname, as Brazilians now do – was everything Itamar was not. Strikingly good-looking, he combines a natural authority with an urbane, faintly saturnine charm. Within a few months, this cosmopolitan prince enjoyed an ascendancy over an ...”

“... marginal. But if the test of any major work is also the questions it prompts, a few loose thoughts may be worth bouncing off these superbly polished surfaces. The axis around which the trilogy organises the history of the ‘long 19th century’ – running, as it were, from 1776 or 1789 to 1914 – is, in Hobsbawm’s words, ‘the triumph and transformation ...”

“... reputation and pride were the main issue at stake in these lawsuits. And then, just like that, in May 1912, Wilbur died of typhoid. He was 45. He’d had a close call from the disease before, in his twenties, but this time the illness took its course in a few weeks. His father wrote: ‘A short life, full of consequences. An unfailing intellect, imperturbable ...”