“... in his chequered family background. Two recent books, biographies of his father and his mother, may help to provide a genealogy of disappointment – a fuller explanation of how Obama came so grievously to disappoint his supporters as well as, perhaps, himself. Sally Jacobs’s The Other Barack tells the sad story of the president’s father. Despite ...”

“... the Japanese and Chinese, short sharp on-the-road squibs, and longer, serial compositions that may have been cooking for decades. Listening to recordings of the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, you can hear the big audience being drawn in, the warmth of the laughter. Snyder spoke about the sequence Mountains and Rivers without End. Journey after ...”

“... fan complains that he can’t concentrate: the actress has left him ‘reeling’. The reader may be reeling too at this point – at the sheer freaky incongruity of it all. Sarah and Sigmund: the imp-brain runs amok. Odd counterfactuals begin to form in the cerebrum. What if the inventor of psychoanalysis had ‘seen’ Bernhardt: not just in the ...”

“... In the process, we see that these two types of material are not so different as they may at first seem. The most striking similarity between the superhero comic and the memoir-in-comics is the motif of ‘double identity’. This is perhaps the defining feature of the superhero. We recognise Superman not by his ability to freeze objects by ...”

“... in belly dancing. Most scandalous of all was his debut back in Leningrad in Don Quixote on 27 May 1960. As the audience waited for the curtain to go up on the last act, Nureyev was in his dressing-room refusing to go on. The problem was the ‘lampshade’ pants he was obliged to wear. He wanted to appear in tights alone, as Western dancers did. His ...”

“... notion of the feudal loyalty that forms his ideal of class relations, work is the only thing a man may rightfully demand from his rulers, and their provision of it is the only thing that binds him to submit to their power. Man requires something or someone to be faithful to. If the place of Fact or Truth or the Ineffable should turn out to be empty, it is of ...”

“... in the years immediately before the enclosure than in its aftermath, and that the labouring poor may have been ‘marginally better off’ as a result of enclosure. There were other changes. Festival days – Plough Monday, for example – were abolished by those whom Clare termed the ‘vulgar tyrants of the soil’. Enclosure also infringed the right to ...”

“... down an ace. He was out to find something wrong with my story. ‘Probably he is no good. He may steal your money.’ I saw of course that, in his world, the term ‘agent’ would cover some broad, unsavoury categories. But what about ‘Import-Export’, as written on his business card? That didn’t sound to me like the essence of probity. I wanted to ...”

“... rule and guide … so properly [do they] belong to a master for the time of their seruice, as he may not only keepe them himselfe for his owne seruice, but also passe them ouer, and giue, or sell them to another … The customes and statutes of our land doe also permit masters to make ouer their seruants from one to one: and on their death-beds to bequeath ...”

“... vague programme of domestic reform and anti-imperialism – as a threat. The country’s old elite may have lost control of the executive with Chávez’s election, but the civil service, judiciary, bureaucracy and state oil industry, along with some sectors of the military, remained intact and autonomous, serving as vectors of reaction. For the first five ...”

“... access and information, but not so much I have to pretend I am ready to support our boys come what may. So I tell him what I think, that it is the wrong war at the wrong time, but that if I was an Iraqi, I’d be longing for the Americans to come, and hoping they wouldn’t kill me, and hoping they would leave as soon as Saddam was gone. Vernon is friendly ...”

“... kinds of map depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.’However, while the divide may have been intellectually generative, pragmatically useful and politically palatable, it also created instabilities. The first was in the economy itself. Historical experience suggested that the successful stabilisation of financial conditions led not to the ...”

“... Farrell told Kate Andersen Brower that he got a sense when he was with her of how ‘magical it may have been to have loved her in a romantic way’. Taylor said he was a ‘true Celt’ and reminded her of Burton. When he visited to give her a volume of Yeats, she kept him waiting for an hour before emerging in a wheelchair, her hair ‘as high as the ...”

“... even routine, among the settlers. According to a piece in the New Statesman, ‘that an employer may beat his native servant without trial and at his discretion is acceptable as the proper thing.’ Helen wrote, before her trial, that ‘so many have told me with almost fear in their voice that it might so easily have happened to them, as they had from time ...”

“... vital energy of seeming more plausible than the truth. And that is our world. Conspiracy nowadays may be as fleet as thought, and theories of fiction gather around every true event. ‘Theories that Trump had engineered the shooting himself for votes,’ Fiona Hamilton wrote in the Times,or the opposite narrative that it had been carried out by the ‘deep ...”