“... the jealous type, it’s fun to read reviews of Junot Díaz in mainstream American papers. There may not be an American writer alive whose ratio of positive to negative press is more favourable; critics do backflips for the guy. Unfortunately, given the corporate prudery of their employers, they can’t quote his most perfervid prose. I offer this from his ...”

“... its true name is the rule of the mob … Heaven help those who by expressing republican sentiment may provoke the rage of the mob.’ The warehouses on the Queens waterfront and on the empty streets leading away from the East River will eventually be torn down and yet another real-estate company will publish brochures for apartments with views of Manhattan ...”

“... a class of hereditary serfs called ‘leet men’. The only countervailing feature – one that may suggest Locke’s influence – was a very generous measure of religious toleration; atheists alone were barred from landholding. More telling still on the matter of Locke’s authorship, in 1671 the Lords Proprietors rewarded his efforts in shaping the ...”

“... to remove in the usual violent ways – gin, a scalding bath, a wire coathanger – for fear they may leave traces on her body. ‘Everyone would know what had happened, and what was driving her was the need for privacy. What was driving her was the need for no other person on earth to ever find out what was taking place inside her body.’Nolan ...”

“... turmoil means that there are secret motions, out of sight, that lie concealed in matter … you may be sure this starts with atoms’). But this inference, whether Lucretian or Brownian, remained a qualitative insight. It said nothing about the real size of the invisible atoms. Even at the turn of the 20th century, a young Albert Einstein was frustrated ...”

“... the difference between drag and trans expression.Part of my delayed engagement with Drag Race may have been down to residual shame, having grown up with Section 28 and as a Jehovah’s Witness. It might also have had something to do with a misguided notion that the show was lowbrow and had nothing to teach me. But I came to see Drag Race as amounting to ...”

“... an appearance that sits ill with his output of works on philosophy and his love of music. There may be something telling in Aubrey’s note that Bacon ‘had a delicate, lively hazel eye; Dr Harvey told me it was like the eye of a viper.’ Yet Aubrey asserts that Bacon was envied by Coke. His Essaies acquired and maintained an almost oracular status. The ...”

“... each state is authorised to ‘appoint’ electors ‘in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct’. Since the mid-19th century the legislature of every state has ceded this role to the wider electorate. But could a state legislature shift the benign course of democratisation into reverse? According to Lessig and Seligman, nothing in the ...”

“... to abandon King’s pacifistic integrationism in favour of militant black nationalist rhetoric.In May 1966, Lewis was initially re-elected as chair of SNCC. But after some members expressed dissatisfaction, another vote was taken in which Carmichael prevailed. This wasn’t altogether unexpected. Carmichael’s faction believed that Lewis was insufficiently ...”

“... paid for by the same desperate people they were intended to help? The Sanità’s intentions may have been virtuous, but they were nevertheless shaped by an intractable perception of the poor as thoughtless and lazy, opportunists who took advantage of the state of emergency.Early modern historians used to be interested in the idea of the ‘world turned ...”

“... an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive fifty years from now.Coppola’s attempt at a tongue-in-cheek embrace of the award wasn’t unusual in the canon of celebrity Razzie acceptances. Brian Helgeland, who wrote the Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic ...”

“... to the Maidan, where the temporary government, supposed to rule till elections at the end of May, was due to be presented to the crowd. The square is bisected by Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s main street, a broad north-south thoroughfare lined by the looming Stalinist spires and arches, the heavy façades, of the postwar reconstruction. At an early stage the ...”

“... shops and cheap restaurants. There are few neighbourhoods like it in central London, but its days may be numbered. Until the 1960s, Drummond Street continued to meet Eversholt Street on the east side of Euston, but this section of the road disappeared, along with the Euston Arch, when the present station was built. There was considerable opposition to the ...”

“... April 1963 until I left school and Doris’s house two weeks before taking my A-levels sometime in May 1966. That is, a period you might think of as the early 1960s, although the 1960s didn’t really announce themselves to us until 1967 (‘Good heavens, so this is the 1960s we will hear so much about’). And then rapidly, almost concurrently, the 1960s ...”