“... estimate for the same period, but still a shocking number of victims. The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated. At their heart is an institution known as the native authority. Since the colonial period, native authorities ...”

“... only was he allowed to keep his job: he was made chair of a new working group on the internet. In May 2009 the new approach was given its first major public outing, and a fresh lick of paint. ‘Twenty-first-century statecraft’, Hillary Clinton said in a series of choreographed speeches, was about using the internet to work from the ‘bottom up’: it was ...”

“... Paul, that the apocalypse was imminent. ‘The great mutations of the world are acted, our time may be too short for our designes.’ From the same premises, the Puritan strain of Christianity drew more urgent conclusions: fly from the wrath to come. Understand that you need a saviour. Repent of your sins, amend your life, while time remains. For Browne too ...”

“... tongues, that syllable mens names On Sands, and Shoars, and desert Wildernesses. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The vertuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion Conscience. – O welcom pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering Angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemish’t form of ...”

“... charlatan. The doubleness referred to in the title of Lennon’s ample and very loyal biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about ...”

“... thinking (on the assumption that words are cheap), Branson’s methods have often worked. He may not be as rich as he says he is, but he is still a lot richer than almost everyone else. How has he done it? In business terms, Branson likes to present himself as a child of the late 1960s, which was when he started out, achieving his first success as a ...”

“... magicians vilified for their worship of fire in The Arabian Nights, whose characteristic turbans may be an origin of the wizard’s hat in children’s books. Lorck likes treating the human subject as a form equal in interest to a building or some other inanimate object, and such juxtapositions run throughout his work. When I saw the print I found the ...”

“... left the paper early in 1935, to prepare for an exam that would further his teaching career, in May the Pavese home was raided by police, who found an incriminating letter from an imprisoned anti-Fascist. Pavese did not explain that the letter was in fact meant for his girlfriend, a more determined revolutionary, Tina Pizzardo. He was condemned to three ...”

“... by a pair of twins, figments of each other’s imagination; as a series of texts whose authorship may never be reliably established. This short novel caused a big stir. ‘Pamuk in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new ...”

“... refraining from attacking Israel but are receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. They may one day turn their guns towards Israel, but if they are in control of a state they can be deterred; and if they aren’t, they will remain, in the words of the former head of military intelligence Amos Yadlin, ‘third-order threats’. Hizbullah is ...”

“... to ‘subject groups’; the authority of the analyst would be thrown into question. After May 1968, when he’d ridden to the barricades on a motorcycle at four in the morning and then rushed back to La Borde to encourage the patients to join him, Guattari stepped up his efforts. He devoted himself to fomenting unrest, assigning staff members to tasks ...”

“... kickbacks from the landlord to ensure the contract was renewed’. Extended families and tribes may try to arrange jobs for as many members as possible in a given NGO, often without the knowledge of the unsuspecting foreigners. Nowadays, it is hard to find an educated Afghan who is not in the pay of foreigners. A civil servant would have to take a lot of ...”

“... Marias, hover in the suburban gloaming, ready (one presumes) for any emergency transport that may be needed. Members of a not so hidden armoured Swat team peep out, fairy-like and phosphorescent, from giant hydrangea bushes. More odd shadowy forms – sniper-pigeons no doubt – flutter on the rooftops above us. Several CEO wives, it’s rumoured, have ...”

“... burned at the stake in front of jeering crowds. Imaginative though Dante’s infernal punishments may be, the spirit behind them was familiar. It would be hard to miss the continuity between history and the Inferno. What was Dante’s position in all this? The third child of a mother who died when he was very young, he belonged to neither the old landed elite ...”

“... In any case, the relationship with Murray had begun to sour. Money was part of the problem. Byron may have begun his career refusing to take any when Murray repeatedly pressed him, but that didn’t last. Their first real fight occurred when Byron offered to pass along to the meddlesome Dallas the value of one of his copyrights, and Murray balked at paying a ...”