“... to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilisation” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed ...”

“... affiliation with non-American currents of thought, habits of life – styles of radical will, in Susan Sontag’s phrase – have continued well past that now excoriated decade. But a great deal of the change in the country has to do with re-configurations in demography and economic power. Regional characteristics, once as stable and as predictable as any ...”

“... prime-time featuring of two explicitly ‘pro-choice’ speakers, Colin Powell and Congresswoman Susan Molinari, and by the entire tone of Dole’s acceptance speech, long on tolerance, silent on abortion. Again, the logic of this strategy of dissociation was quite simple. Of all voters, the New Republicans are the least likely to go over to Clinton, whose ...”

“... has used its clout to coerce Mexico and Canada into forming an alliance called the Organisation of North American Nations for, apparently, no other reason than the chance to use the acronym Onan. In addition, a large part of New England – basically everything above Boston – has been ceded to, or forced on, Canada, and renamed the Great Concavity; it now ...”

“... 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 ...”