“... not a border), militants came across the Israeli edition of a Brazilian trance festival being held close to Re’im. Almost immediately it became a massacre, with hundreds of festival-goers killed and others taken hostage. In the kibbutzim the fighters targeted the local rapid response forces (in Nir Yitzhak they killed about five armed men), along with ...”

“... alongside Tolkien (MSI activists had set up a Camp Hobbit in 1977). The festival continues to be held, featuring international stars of the far right from Steve Bannon to Viktor Orbán and inevitably – or so it feels nowadays – Elon Musk. By 2004 Meloni had been elected president of the AN’s youth wing, the first woman to lead any such political ...”

“... either as economic success sabotaged by the oil crisis and the consequences of over-tempting loans held out by disingenuous Western bankers, or as hectic boom, unwisely stoked up, and followed by inevitable crash; either as a Westpolitik, shrewdly negotiated with the West Germans, or as mere submission to Moscow’s interests in Brandt’s ...”

“... booked in the Latin Quarter. ‘For security reasons,’ the message ran, ‘the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.’ I was duly provided with an address, and at ten the next morning I arrived at Foucault’s apartment to find a number of people – but not Sartre – already milling around. No one was ever to explain the mysterious ...”

“... son planned to kill his father and Hildegard’s sons. When Charlemagne had crushed the revolt, he held a big assembly of ‘Franks and other faithful ones’ at Regensburg, Tassilo’s former capital, where death sentences were meted out to the wicked son (Charlemagne commuted it to monastic confinement) and some of his supporters (these were carried ...”

“... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how tightly. Through ignorance, carelessness, pride and ...”

“... with Romanticism’. Hamilton regularly offers materialism as the virtuous alternative. It is held to be politically enabling: the materialist is ‘empowered to participate in the natural excitation and productivity’ of the external world, which is magnificent and mysterious – think of Shelley assuming Mont Blanc to be on his side against Castlereagh ...”

“... into my barn’ (Matthew 13, 30). Religious language with a different resonance is deployed by David Halperin in his Saint Foucault, which bears the subtitle ‘Towards a Gay Hagiography’. Halperin is well aware of the dangerous echo of Saint Genet, Sartre’s overbearing and invasive gloss on another writer’s life and work, but appropriates another ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... his own. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, later published stories in the magazine and his son David would also find a path into the fiction section. Having secured a berth in the upper echelon of eminence, Updike never forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John ...”

“... quickly, and aloud.’ (The faux-solicitous note recalls one of his best jokes, in a review of David Lodge’s Working with Structuralism: ‘His title,’ Carey said, ‘has a making-the-best-of-it ring, rather like “Surviving with Sciatica”.’) Based on this account, there is not much doubt where his own preference in the 20th century lies and it is ...”

“... some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening paper men, to cover unexpected news of the day … a big fire, strike … railway accidents, pit accidents, or any other major catastrophes in which the public, I fear, is deeply interested.’ Two years later, on 30 ...”

“... then, that the two finest biographies of Fanon have been written by an Englishman and an American. David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography was published in 2000: it is the kind of book that has always (justifiably) attracted the epithet ‘magisterial’. Macey’s account is now joined by The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz: necessarily a more ...”

“... of me returns a powerful echo to Adorno’s ideal of concentrated listening. When my attention is held by music, I achieve a state of mental and physical equilibrium which no other experience gives me, except perhaps the experience of silence, and I sometimes think of music as a species of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to ...”