“... than all the tracts combined to bring anti-slavery into the kitchens, parlours and hearts of the North. Scholarly insistence on the close ties between the rhetoric of anti-slavery and the rhetoric of women’s rights, and among the major figures in both of these antebellum movements, has resulted in an outpouring of books and articles on women and ...”

“... planning, with a particular emphasis on shrinking the extraordinary consumption of the global north via economic restructuring and domestic and international redistribution.Any such plan must envision a rapid and highly co-ordinated global programme of decommissioning. Our current growth-oriented regime has put most of the power and resources in very few ...”

“... Macedonia was admitted in 2020, but only after changing its name, under pressure from Greece, to North Macedonia. And there was no demonstrated democratic mandate in favour of Nato membership plans in Ukraine in the mid-2000s when Viktor Yushchenko did much to advance them, or in Montenegro in 2017 when it joined. But for many new adherents in Eastern Europe ...”

“... costly war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In almost every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and ...”

“... peace of those who have simply lost the capacity to take any more. I’ve heard it said that the North Vietnamese veterans experienced nothing equivalent to post-Vietnam stress syndrome – even those members of the Viet Cong and NVA who spent whole years underground in tunnels and will never again walk upright. Their bodies were twisted but not apparently ...”

“... of what the beautiful ought to be (but see Roger Scruton, below). To be sure, both Baudrillard and Susan Sontag have recommended something like a diet cure for images: that we try to be reasonable and reduce our intake, to fast once in a while perhaps, and exercise other senses. Yet this is pre-eminently an addictive society, and of all conceivable responses ...”

“... of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ...”

“... up their photograph?’Although over the years his work has found fans in Beckett, Sartre and Susan Sontag, and although Poil de carotte was a set text in French schools into the 1960s, Renard remains a minor interest among Anglophone audiences. His wife, Marie, cut a third of the journal after his death in 1910; once she’d finished editing it for ...”

“... in some way, as both have teaching jobs at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, just north of LA. So they meet, they fall in love, they move in together – and immediately, their hilltop love nest has to double as a family home, ‘abundant and containing’, for Harry’s three-year-old son. A couple of years later and they are joined by ...”

“... freeloading and eating from bins in the autumn of 1967 when Manson recruited the topless dancer Susan Atkins in Haight-Ashbury. Unlike the others, Atkins ‘looked good’ and wasn’t shy. Manson told her ‘she needed to imagine she was making love to her father.’ Sex would be the means of recruiting male followers, as well as obtaining food, shelter ...”

“... magazine of the New York school (and never mind for the nonce that Bellow is from Chicago and Susan Sontag from Los Angeles), several streams have originated. The dissident Left – as opposed to the proto-Communist Left – symbolised by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James ...”

“... stupidity. If one puts that together with the unforgettable picture of Benn which emerges from Susan Crosland’s biography of Tony Crosland – Benn ringing up at all hours with phone pranks, practical jokes, impersonations and Goon Show voices – one realises that the common strand is a good-hearted boyishness. Far from being the sinister ogre of the ...”

“... public than was the case with the keen lovers of the contemporary art of former periods. In North America, over the last quarter of a century at least, ‘modernism’ has almost always meant large works designed for the Museums of Modern Art. The first artists to produce works for such a destination were the supposed founders of the Modern ...”

“... same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story of these antiquarians and what they learned from the ruins that obsessed them. Their sensibility, as she shows, was itself ancient. In the age of Augustus, as Rome became a marble city, poets looked back with ...”

“... copies across the border instead of his usual smuggled butter. We might have called it the Black North, for being dark with Protestants, but when I was a child in the 1960s, Ulster was the place British sweets came from: Spangles, Buttons and, most notably, Opal Fruits. It was across this border that the feminists of ‘the condom train’ staged a mass ...”