“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... optimism -‘cheerfulness in the bunker’ – before polling day in the 1874 General Election. ‘Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign’ is a cheeky aside, given that Jenkins evidently expects his readers to remember who was in which bunker at the relevant moment. There is more to Gladstone, however, than politics. His restless energy ...”

“... W.G. Sebald (say), whereas really it is Vertigo, a version of Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. by Michael Hulse. In the Belfast poems, the movement of words from one place or voice to another is a focus of attention. Carson encourages us to see that the slightest transposition matters. When he writes, ‘Spokesman for censored political party spoke in someone ...”

“... were funny; he describes a ‘concussion forum’ at Twickenham in 2013 at which a doctor called Michael Turner played videos of jockeys falling on their heads, to laughs. One strand of the book follows the story of Jeff Astle, a former professional footballer who developed early-onset dementia and whose family have since campaigned for awareness of the link ...”

“... and all-connecting to pause and magnify. He cites all the other clever British pop authorities – Michael Bracewell, Jon Savage, Simon Reynolds – while replicating their tendency to jump frustratingly between subjects and stiffen up their sentences with jargon. Haslam’s footnotes, interestingly, are much more relaxed and informative. Here he can just be ...”

“... that a man could disappear while lying still in a peat bog – just as long as he was wearing black boots, a stone-coloured cap, a waistcoat the colour of a peat hag and knickerbockers as green as grass. It was not until December 1915 that Solomon was asked to visit the French camouflage workshop at Amiens, and to join others in developing a British ...”

“... from the previous eighteen months: colour had come back, after years of exclusion, into Kline’s black and white world. There are distinct echoes of the Klines – of his tribute to King Oliver’s syncopation, for example – in Suburb in Havana. De Kooning, to sum up, was a creature of the New York School. But he was also a naïf, a Great American ...”

“... Russia. Running parallel with the River Dniester, and stretching from the Carpathians to the Black Sea, once oil is pumped into it and ignited, this dyke will become ‘a wall of liquid fire’. Soon, the Carol Line will form an unbroken chain of fortifications, ‘a living wall against aggression’.‘“rivers of fire” to guard rOmania: canals to be ...”

“... the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers you always see for sale at demonstrations: Socialist Worker, the Socialist, the Morning Star, Socialist Solidarity and the Workers’ Hammer. A variety of placards were stacked ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”

“... as ‘going home’. It seemed so easy when music did it: who wouldn’t want to swat away those black accidentals and come back to sunny C major? These satisfying resolutions are sometimes called ‘perfect cadences’; there is a lovely subspecies called the ‘English cadence’, used often by composers like Tallis and Byrd, in which, just before the ...”

“... cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the ...”

“... of native collaborators, who in the eyes of nationalists were betraying their own people, like black policemen in South Africa today. A Russian who abandons his native land and settles in a hostile country is always credited with the most laudable motives, like the archetypal author of I chose freedom. An honest Soviet dissident like Sakharov ...”

“... white voices, as if they would be better able to achieve balance: Had the writer been brown or black, they [newspapers and magazines] would turn down the publicity team’s pitches, because a) they are not interested in yet another writer of colour being angry, and b) they think writers of colour are good for adding, well, colour, with immigration ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”