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“... The principal city of Turkish Kurdistan is Diyarbakir, a bustling place that in the last fifty years has overflowed its magnificently forbidding basalt walls. These dramatic fortifications – built following the town’s capture by the great Saljuq Malik Shah in 1088 – remain uncluttered and defiant on the southern side: their dark ramparts can be seen from miles away ...”

“... isn’t easy to describe this Protean work, but the 18th-century flavour of the title page offers a useful preliminary hint. Essentially the story is an inversion of Gulliver’s Travels. The voyager, Oi Paz, views Sykaos, our own dear planet, with the pained, baffled rationality of a ...”

“... world revolution in the 1920s and 1930s – not surprisingly, since of all the European upheavals at the end of the First World War, theirs was the only revolution that succeeded. But the trouble with leading the world revolution, as far as Stalin and his associates were concerned, was ...”

“... you’d have to have Latin coming out of your ears to think of making the meaning of the word a word is derived from more significant than its actual English usage. The effect is perversely satisfying. Anywhere else but in Milton, you might feel grateful that a nice-sounding word has been chosen over one of its ...”

“... God. When they looked beyond Europe, however, these monarchs and their advisers could still find a world that teemed with kings, princes and potentates, whose aura seemed largely intact. Stepping into this world, they could put a royal gloss on the ruthless business of economic imperialism by coaxing or browbeating ...”

“... There are​ people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore ...”

“... In 1992, the UN Security Council opened a dossier on breaches of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions in the former Yugoslavia. Paragraph 5 of UNSC Resolution 771 called on all states or humanitarian organisations with knowledge of such violations to pass it on to the Security Council. These were the early days when Bosnia was high on Clinton’s list of priorities (it remained a priority for many in his first Administration long after the President had lost interest), and the US made several submissions ...”

“... Buzz Lightyear​ is naked, save for his standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs ...”

“... A lot of the stories, truthful or otherwise, about Picasso are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal ...”

“... E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier. Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow ...”

“... In the retrospective​ currently on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass cube in Berlin, six of Nan Goldin’s works are displayed inside large black felt-lined structures. Each has a different kind of entrance: one made of sumptuous velvet, another a cold blue corridor ...”

“... Visiting Perth in May 1922, D.H. Lawrence struck one May Gawlor, who met him at a literary picnic, as a cross between ‘a reddish bearded able-bodied seaman and a handyman at the backdoor’, so that she wondered ‘how this rather shabby, slightly coarse, far from spruce and tidy little man could possibly have caused such a flutter, apart from his books ...”

“... remember the helicopter circling above Wear Garth. I remember it was torturing my brain because a voice was saying: “Nikki, you are going to be all right, your mam’s waiting for you at your nana’s.” On a loudspeaker, over and over. “Your mam’s waiting for you, you are not ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”