“... a start, Richard’s diagnosis of Patricia’s problem as ‘childish ennui’ suggests that he may have read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), the book that popularised the idea of the housewife’s ‘bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world’. And like Friedan, Richard believes that education ...”

“... people in Bristol I raised the subject of the new Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force in May, removing the power of private landlords to evict without cause. No one gave Labour much credit for it. Of my interviewees, the kindest about the legislation was the councillor who left Labour for the Greens. ‘They’re stopping the greed of the ...”

“... hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and his political model may serve as something of an inspiration too. Trump’s business has always operated organisationally like a prototypical Mafia, with a tight circle of family, friends and flunkies, bearing little resemblance to a modern corporation. As Masha Gessen put it in the ...”

“... rejection of cultural pessimism, and they shared a reverence for traditional Western culture: they may have expressed ‘radical styles of will’, but they also invoked the authority of canonical critics. In their writings on photography, both drew inspiration from John Berger, moved, if not quite persuaded, by his insistence on the medium’s insurrectionary ...”

“... the depiction of autocrats in Cameroonian cartoons to Christian eschatology to posthumanism. We may not be sure where all this leads us, but Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ‘postcolonial left’. This isn’t ...”

“... that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion. With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in ...”

“... probably made her sense of guilt, after his premature death, no easier to bear, especially as she may have been half hoping he would die, believing that after a shortish interval she and Giddy would be married. But Giddy married someone else, and Anna was left with the duty and the penance of keeping her husband’s flame alive by ensuring that his ...”

“... scientism. If, for example, you understand perception and misperception scientifically, you may come to understand the bases of social injustice. If you learn to think like a scientist and investigate things for yourself, trusting no one, you will bypass the liars who misrepresent reality and find truth yourself. To be a good American citizen was to be ...”

“... stronger, the glow of fever looked like ruddy health. Cora embraced every hopeful sign. As late as May 1900 she wrote happily to H.G. Wells: ‘Lung trouble seems over!’ But Wells wasn’t deceived. ‘He did his utmost to conceal his symptoms and get on with his dying,’ Wells wrote. ‘Only at the end did his wife wake up to what was coming.’ A ...”

“... CIA in formulating its assessments on Iran. But his re-defection to Iran in 2010 suggests that he may have been a double agent, calling into question all his reporting to the CIA, before and after his defection. Operation Merlin, in which the CIA attempted to pass on to Iran flawed designs for a nuclear weapon, further undermines the CIA’s credibility as a ...”

“... accountability and use of force that made it possible were the creations of Yeltsinism. There may seem to be more obvious contrasts in the realm of economic policy between the 1990s and the 2000s: Yeltsin implemented a radical programme of market reforms and mass privatisation, seeking to dismantle for ever the state socialist system; Putin moved to ...”

“... that ‘liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination.’ Siedentop acknowledges this reality only in his assertion that ‘we are in a competition of beliefs’ with Chinese-style capitalism and Islam, which ‘offends some of our deepest intuitions’. This is ‘a strange ...”

“... in its legendary “purple dusk”’ – and the excitement of the visit as a whole – may well be the best part of the biography: ‘Merrill was released then into the sensory revelation that was Greece. For the first time, he heard nightingales sing and peacocks cry. He strolled in Athens’s “extraordinarily lovely” gardens: “Lemon and ...”

“... By now, those not much acquainted with the 16th century or the concerns of European Christians may be wondering what all the fuss was about: this babble of words and definitions and excitement about holy images. Behind the Reformation lay the overriding concern of medieval Europe: salvation from eternal death and torment after the physical end of our brief ...”

“... There’s a sensation of being forcibly held beneath the surface of the writing, with results that may feel a little like drowning. There’s a reason for the increased pressure being transmitted through the prose, and that’s the need to maintain an impression of unified material though the rules of engagement of the book have in fact been changed. Intercut ...”