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“... Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya index? Breathless dance tracks like ‘Is It All over My Face’, ‘Go Bang!’ and ‘Kiss Me Again’ are ...”

“... Inside are slideshows made up of photographs taken across fifty years. Goldin’s instinct is to be with a person in their pain – or their euphoria, or wildness, or ambivalence. She has said that the show’s title, This Will Not End Well, refers to Gaza, Lebanon, the US, climate change, Sudan, Germany and more besides. Whatever ‘this’ is, it’s still ...”

“... in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that ...”

“... noble nature was intentional. ‘Staffage’ is the word for human and animal extras, I find, and David Teniers the Younger, whose work Turner admired, is offered as the source of their plain looks. Whatever his narrative intention, foreground accents – not just people, but boats, buoys, goats, ducks – are important parts of the visual machinery. They ...”

“... conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left. In the actual world, 5G’s feeble radio waves aren’t capable of any of this – you’d get more radiation standing near a baby monitor ...”

“... Or was it your first sight of those 11 yellow-haired Romanians? Earlier tournaments are now known by their ‘defining moments’. In 1970, we had Moore and Pele swapping shirts; in ‘82, there was the demented Altobelli; in ‘86 the Hand of God; in ‘90, Gazza’s tears. I’m not sure what it was in ‘94: Romario and Bebeto doing that baby-cradling ...”

“... In Euripides’ drama Hippolytus (428 BC), when the women of Troezen learn that Phaedra, their queen, is ill, they wonder if she has been possessed by a god or whether her ‘soul’ has been bound to her bed by grief because her husband has found another woman ...”

“... a young male was prepared for the rites de passage from which he would emerge as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), a volume of essays in which he enthusiastically supports Foucault’s view that ...”

“... an international symposium on waste disposal at Bosphorus University, Istanbul. This has got to be the Cinderella end of environmentalism, less cuddly than dolphins, lacking the apocalyptic quality of the hole in the ozone layer. That’s probably why they’re surprised to see me here: an accompanying wife, and a writer too. ‘What have dump sites to do ...”

“... was Wittgenstein’s objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that the procedure might be impressive, but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it going on indefinitely? On Julian Barnes, who is so addicted to the business or game of interpretations, the question does not seem to weigh so heavily. We perhaps misunderstand ...”

“... nation’s doubt and anxiety, then it failed miserably: its pat conclusions (eventually undermined by the 1979 Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations) were ignored, spurned in favour of those 26 laden volumes and the jumble of confused and contradictory evidence they contain – the playground of the conspiracy junkie. Nicholas Branch, a pivotal ...”

“... match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present ...”

“... Africa or Asia, but himself provides an account which gives all the agency to Europe. What is to be done? The answer I have attempted myself has been to study the internal dynamics of African, or Asian, societies in such detail that it is possible to discern their distinguishing features even under colonialism and capitalism. But it would take a long time to ...”

“... televising of the House of Lords, on 23 January was, I found, a pleasant shock. It might well be that the other viewers consisted entirely of the unemployed, but I doubt if even the most bitter among them felt that time and money were being wasted. Helping to make the broadcast a surprise were one’s expectations, which could not help but ...”

“... Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott has a claim to be considered the great poet of the same experience. They share an acute sense of belonging to more than one culture and hence to none. The reference in the title poem to the Caribbean’s ‘history-orphaned islands’ is a motto for many other poems in ...”