“... cut spending and make the whole Vatican outfit more serious: Most Reverend Eminence, first of all may I beg you to accept my warmest congratulations for your appointment as Secretary for the Economy. Meantime, I am pleased to inform your eminence that the most eminent cardinals are eligible for the following concessions: the purchase of groceries in ...”

“... it’s longer than her other books, and this is probably a mistake: towards the end, the reader may start flipping pages, feeling slightly nauseated from a surfeit of suffering. Alexievich has written that all her books are part of a history of utopia. The utopia here isn’t so much the Soviet project itself – though that’s part of it – but ...”

“... the Temmler factory, which could now press them at the rate of 833,000 a day. On the night of 10 May the Panzer Group von Kleist, led by 1222 tanks (the largest motorised unit ever assembled), was supplied with twenty thousand Pervitin pills. The tank general Heinz Guderian had convinced Hitler with his daring proposal to concentrate the battalions on a push ...”

“... French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Orwell arrived there in December 1936 to ‘fight fascism’ and walked ...”

“... parrrrr la foule’ – ‘carried along by the rushing crowd’). She may be accusing the crowd with her words, but with her body and voice, she is seducing them. When her last word is done, she continues the story with gestures, dancing now, as if doing a mad farandole with the crowd, her eyes half-closed and her feet tapping. The ...”

“... has never tried to see beneath her skirt and asks Him to protect her always from boys or men who may want to do impure things to her. In answer to his prayer he is allowed to see how the man who goes home to the Rockies sometimes makes out through gaps in forested cliffs and beyond tenuous valleys the true country of Idaho where it trembles, faint and ...”

“... Kirk Douglas ‘in his crueller moments (see Ace in the Hole and Champion)’. Here, the events may be true (he’s at pains to tell us he has fact-checked the incidents with the main cast of agency characters): it’s just Clancy’s responses to them which sometimes seem as if life was imitating MGM. For instance, the book opens with a chase: Clancy is ...”

“... leave a large space blank, which disturbed the artist. Portraits of Bembo – or portraits that may be of him – abound, some by giants like Titian and others hard or impossible to assign. Commissioning works of art did not exhaust his energies. In his city house in Padua, he created a garden in which he cultivated rare herbs, ten years before the ...”

“... technique to imitate “magic picture pad”,’ reads an obscure note from 1970-71. ‘There may be the question of resemblance or substitution (Freud).’ Maybe with a nod to toys like Etch A Sketch, Johns here alludes to the ‘mystic writing pad’ that Freud used to describe how the unconscious operates, the way it retains inscriptions even ...”

“... In February, Nato announced it was expanding its deployment in Iraq to four thousand troops. It may be possible to make a cleaner break in Afghanistan. But the Afghan security forces Nato claims to have trained are a shell. The invaders are leaving graves behind but precious little else. The civil war will continue.The​ Ministry of Defence tried to ...”

“... wasn’t the only auto industry executive who could have schooled Nissan in these measures, but he may have been the only one capable of implementing them. Being a foreigner helped, or rather being the right kind of foreigner: neither tall nor blue-eyed (this was apparently appreciated at Nissan), and too indeterminate in origin (born in Brazil, raised in ...”

“... wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local gentry. They were Catholic too, which may have been part of it. Both parents seem to have viewed their daughter as an instrument for social improvement – Carrington took refuge from their ambitions in a vivid imaginative world. One of her earliest surviving notebooks, from 1927, when she was ten ...”

“... were quickly integrated into the cosmopolitan community of liberation movements. The Panthers may not have noticed, or perhaps didn’t care, that Algeria itself was a conservative, closed society, that women were not really free, that a form of anti-black racism existed among the population, and that the Algerian establishment’s generosity required ...”

“... precedent in Reagan’s 1980s trade war with Japan. If Trump can make any claim to uniqueness, it may be that, once his record on Covid-19 is factored in, he is the only postwar US president whose administration is responsible for the deaths of more Americans than foreigners. During this year’s presidential campaign, while the gap on domestic policy has ...”

“... but has the consequence that aortic aneurysm is classified as a disorder of soft tissue, which may be logically correct but feels out of place. The problem is that any attempt to devise a scheme that is rigorously logical inevitably diverges from the way we actually talk about the world. The point, and the lesson I take from Cantwell Smith’s book, is ...”