“... of this terrible disjuncture produces denialism of many kinds, and through that gap the far right may find an entry point. The old fascist formula, ‘we say what you’re really thinking,’ authorises an escape from hypocrisy: ‘we think what your behaviour really implies.’A century ago, Clara Zetkin – the Marxist theorist after whom the collective is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... conductor to be brilliant regardless of the quality of the performance he directs, the orchestra may look on him with scepticism and a weary tolerance. The relationship of conductor to players is acutely asymmetrical. Managerial and strategic power lies with the conductor. His musical will is absolute, but he is entirely dependent on the players to implement ...”

“... for all to see; the danger of chaos on a vast scale is evident. Yet what seems bound to happen may not. The country still seems to work. The staples are somehow delivered; connections, corruption and crime supply the luxuries to many; there is plenty of public transport; the apartment blocks are crowded, but in winter they are warm; the freeing of public ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a sweatbox, a spell trapped on a desert island. The bizarre thing is that for Simenon they may also have represented a welcome easing-off and slackening of the pace: during the hack period of his early twenties, he would work every day until he had written eighty typed pages. Then he’d throw up. That’s how you write 150 books in seven years.The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is undone by his own surges of brutality. The destruction brought on by cruelty in The Notebook may imply a need for something like love, but The Proof refutes that possibility: here love kills almost as surely. Like his friends, Lucas too is grieving. He hasn’t heard from his brother, Claus (an anagram), since his departure but sees him ...”

“... to make paper flowers on the beach while he played roulette – an activity that, Rickey suggests, may have sparked Varda’s preference for ‘the artisanal over the mass-produced’. Varda was an obsessive self-archivist (with a particular love of postcards), yet Rickey does not seem to have had access to any personal correspondence, diaries or ...”

“... as a prominent member of the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy. Having been persuaded to spare him, Abacha may have felt that clemency for the Ogoni Nine would be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the military, the only group capable of deposing him. It was, in any case, a measure of Abacha’s growing confidence that he used the pretext of Yar’Adua’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Younger Women and Younger Men. Among the gals: Lily de Rême, the flirty, capricious model for May in the 1913 novel L’Entrave, about a bisexual ménage à trois; Musidora, the early cinema star (and one-time mistress of Willy) who became famous as the kohl-eyed darling of the Surrealists; the promiscuous salonnière Natalie Barney (‘the Pope of ...”

“... girls who had skived off school to shout obscenities about Blair’s decision to go to war. In May 1978 it was the assembly point for the seven thousand Bangladeshis who marched behind Ali’s coffin to Downing Street. Young people in the area were beginning to distance themselves from their parents, whom they had come to see as passive. Their mothers were ...”