“... you use a baseball bat or whatever, you’re going to want to be a responsible gun-owner. It may sound Pollyanna-ish, but if anything positive came out of 9/11 it was the notion that being American is not something defined by politics or class or education, but some humanity that draws us together. It was a rediscovery of the value of . . . every ...”

“... a book on a toilet-seat, for example, or gun-grease derived from the fat of pigs or cows – may have major consequences elsewhere, and vice versa, the structure itself being sometimes transformed in the process. The ‘mediation’ through which a cultural structure constructs a personage or an event as significant – the death of a king, say ...”

“... does not mean that men cannot act decently, and kindly, indeed that the men in our lives may not sometimes be better and more reliable than the women. But it does mean that there are no men, no people, who can ever claim to be entirely beyond its reach. It is always there in the background, incentivising, rewarding and giving cover to good men who ...”

“... for the treatment because ‘they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.’ It may not seem the richest joke, but it has impeccable philosophical credentials, drawing as it does on Henri Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Lewis had attended in the early years of the century. ‘We laugh every time a person gives us the ...”

“... worst section of the 2300-seat palais, with the ‘lumpenproletariat of film lovers’. Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’. At the much ...”

“... is no longer a curse, no longer a birthmark that you carry with you all your life. Rather, it may be fashioned from nothing: it’s a ‘personality bonus’ – words straight out of an Argos catalogue. And if Indianness is addable, it’s also subtractable. Karim, an aspiring actor, is keen to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of ...”

“... women conversing at a cocktail party, are the standing stones of Stenness. The purpose of these may be mysterious, but a short seven miles away is the Neolithic village Skara Brae. Preserved there is a huddle of roofless huts, dug half-underground into midden and sand-dune. You can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and ...”

“... the tiger asserts the light of the inside, as well as the outside: the light that intelligence may cast on its own four walls, in addition to the wonderful and frightening foment of things in the world (their ‘wars’). And in this retrospective by an elderly man inclined to doubt his own gifts as well as what he knew, who leans breathlessly on ...”

“... Bowles later reported on the switchblade knife Cherifa kept handy to castrate ‘any male who may say good evening to her. Never knew a woman who hated men so violently. I’m told she makes a speciality of stealing brides on the eve of their weddings.’ Peter Owen, who published many of Bowles’s books, wrote: Jane’s maid, Sherifa (sic) placed a ...”

“... anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he was forced into exile and in May 1960 settled in Conakry, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Guinea, which had become independent from France in 1958. Here, with the blessing of the Guinean president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Cabral set up the headquarters of the African Party for the ...”

“... talk’. In True Nature, his new biography of Matthiessen, Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his ...”

“... a dragger captain out of Stonington, Connecticut, confesses in one Mitchell piece that he may look serene but he’s dreading something. ‘What?’ a sceptical woman asks. ‘I don’t know,’ says Ellery. ‘I wish to God I did know.’ He was raised Baptist but gets along without it. ‘I used to go to church,’ he adds, ‘just to hear the good ...”

“... said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ Moustapha’s concerns were ...”

“... woman Brooke fell in love with was one who was going to remain out of reach for some time. In May 1908 he went to a Fabian supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the ...”

“... lamentably titled ‘Rock’n’Roll Nigger’. This kind of earnestly meaningless rallying cry may be forgivable in the very young (or very stoned); Smith was 31 when it was recorded. ‘I’m pretty much unmanageable at this point,’ she claimed in a 2002 New Yorker profile. The same profile went on to detail a full itinerary of gigs and poetry ...”