“... from a distance of five centuries. Moctezuma remembers just in time to take off his cloak of white goose feathers before appearing in public, since he is ritually required to give away his garments after such occasions and is far too fond of the cloak to let it go. The mayor, who has an appointment with the emperor, makes muffled sounds of distress in ...”

“... she will stand and look at the rubble lining the Arno. And a whole day will pass. After the ‘white troubled dawn’ in the Boboli Gardens of the first lines of the novel, it will be noon (there’s a reference to the South African soldiers who entered the city six hours earlier) and Banti will have taken refuge below in the Palatine gallery of the ...”

“... which is true – but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing. As Judith Butler has argued, the performative is always melancholic, since the performer knows the role they are enacting is no more than skin deep (‘melancholic’ also because of all the other buried and unconsciously grieved sexual lives one might have led). To ...”

“... a custard-pie violence (‘smack! her sword divorces his codshead from the codpiece’ from ‘Judith’) and a strangely, disarmingly boyish thrall to heroism. You get vivid but cartoonish tropes like the ambush under the bridge (‘Down there, below a bridge, his back on the arch,/Hannibal listens, thoughtful, glorying,/to the dead tramp of the advancing ...”

“... sexual experiences would seem to fall outside them – including the 37 per cent of Kinsey’s white male respondents who admitted to having had ‘some homosexual experiences to the point of orgasm’ in the course of their otherwise heterosexual lives. All these definitional difficulties spring from a basic conceptual impasse. Only a fraction of human ...”

“... towards domination. ‘Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed,’ Judith Butler wrote recently in relation to trans rights, ‘you’re operating within a fascist logic.’ Others see it as an inherent feature of unjust, oppressive societies. Fascism, Langston Hughes wrote in 1936, ‘is a new name for that kind of terror the ...”

“... president’s dirty mouth’ for failing to anticipate the inexpressive profanity revealed on the White House tapes. One of the high points of Roth Unbound is the extract from the tapes (recorded on 3 November 1971) in which Nixon considers his anti-Roth strategy: NIXON: Roth of course is a Jew. HALDEMAN: Oh yes … he’s brilliant in a sick ...”

“... for Jeanne Dielman, was that of her parents’ home: ‘glossy tiles in a brighter shade of white’, ‘modern and functional furniture’, a glass coffee pot, a fireplace with fake logs, vases placed on doilies, nesting tables. This is where the nouveau roman influence ends. The woman of the title has left her husband and tells her neighbour ...”

“... them make a qualitative leap in their careers.’ He had a brief, stormy marriage to the actress Judith Magne, and was Michel Piccoli’s best man at his marriage to Juliette Gréco. He knew how to woo his subjects off and on the page. ‘You are the only one who talked about me as I would have wished,’ the novelist Albert Cohen told him. It was a ...”

“... gained a loyal readership across the political spectrum (his admirers include Emmanuel Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to newspapers and advertising briefs. It is perhaps surprising that such widespread acclaim has been given to a writer who ...”

“... on her way home from her high school graduation: Imani thinks of these attacks on black life by white law enforcers as ‘extreme abortion’. There is a genocide, she’s saying, yet she goes ahead with her own abortion and she makes it explicit that she does so because she wants to. She offers no other justification.The same is true of Up the Junction. We ...”

“... first time I went there, I could see a major divide between their side and ours. Most of them were white, religious and from outside the city; we were a multi-ethnic, New York City-based, progressive group. Every Saturday, the anti-choice group parked a van in front of the abortion clinic, and laid a row of pre-printed signs and images on the sidewalk. Our ...”

“... in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her iPhone that could count days. Rania was a great fan of Snapchat, she posted there every spare minute she had, and on Instagram and ...”