“... is one source for the Hanged Man tarot card. All these examples attest to what the art historian David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, which more puritanical critics might see as fetishism writ large. ‘To be adored or punished, to be welcomed, dreaded, or expelled,’ Heller-Roazen concludes, ‘the image of the absentee is each time ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist has identified this ‘whipping system’ as a pervasive means of increasing the productivity of labour in the cotton fields.* But neither of Cameron’s holdings resembled the ultra-efficient and immensely profitable enterprises Baptist claims cotton plantations had become by the mid-19th century. More often than ...”

“... I read Summers that the FBI had an ‘alternative’ black leader they wished to emplace by these means. It was Samuel Pierce, later to be Ronald Reagan’s ultra-corrupt Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, greeted by the sinister cretin Reagan on one occasion with the salute (to the only black member of his own Cabinet): ‘And how are things in ...”

“... to read them as a tribute to their recipient, especially since the nature of the collection means that Ginsberg fails, unusually, to get a word in edgeways. Ginsberg was noisier and altogether more generous than Burroughs. He was a better scholarly bricoleur and indulged a more systematic passion for reading. He attended at length to the careers of ...”

“... Kissinger’s message is above all an appeal to US politicians to conceive of foreign policy as a means to establish a global order, and a plea that the twin strains of idealism and pragmatism in US foreign policy should be brought closer together. His historical survey, of balance-of-power politics in 18th and 19th-century Europe, is intended as an ...”

“... was primarily an ethnographic rather than an aesthetic hoax. The Rowley materials are by no means solely or even primarily poetical; and the aesthetic qualities of the poems are often not the most important thing about them. Chatterton forged a corpus of heterogeneous works, prose as well as poetry, literary as well as historical. The materials were all ...”

“... superiority of market forces over all forms of statist allocation yet devised by man. By this means the new revisionists approach ‘socialism without socialism’.The whole thrust of the new revisionist writing, as I read it, is towards the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the socialist project is now forlorn, the age of socialism over. The ...”

“... friends’. Since Doon Arbus, the elder daughter, is also executrix of her mother’s estate, this means that none of Arbus’s photographs are reproduced, and the discussion of them is often rather perfunctory and anecdotal. It is a pity, too, that little of their accompanying text can be read here, since Arbus considered herself in part a writer, and her ...”

“... and a long inability to distinguish diseases we now say are utterly distinct except in superficial means of transmission. He has an account of how thought-styles changed in order to make new facts constructible out of experience and enquiry. He wrote precisely of the positive science that Durkheim treated as inviolate and post-sociological. For Fleck and ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... decipherer’s childhood: one of the most brilliant of the American decipherers of Mayan glyphs, David Stuart, was already drawing them at the age of eight, when he went on a trip to the Yucatán with his parents. Childhood is, or anyway was in my cryptophile generation, a time for slipping conspiratorially in and out of the linguistic disguise of some code ...”

“... Ben-Day dots devised by Benjamin Day in 1879 as a technique to produce a printed image by means of gradations of shading translated into a system of dots. More important, the Lichtenstein dots convey the sense, still fairly novel at the time, that mechanical reproduction had resulted in a sea change not only in representation but in appearance as ...”

“... by diaspora’ rather than community. He also refers to them as an ethnicity, by which he means ‘a social group with shared ancestry’. Whatever their beliefs, and no matter how long ago their family had converted, ‘their ancestry … was a permanent threat,’ something that could always be used against them. The historian must attend to lineage ...”

“... through the gamuts for them all. And there was a martyred boy who stood in the bitter wind outside David Greig’s, his blue hands full of cracked eggs. For him I nursed an uplifting passion. I’m not sure that I didn’t rejoice in his suffering as a means to my salvation. Autobiography is an act of self-love, and Barker ...”