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“... philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment, with the Germans Hamann, Jacobi and Herder and with Joseph de Maistre. Virtually alone and entirely unrecognised, Vico had participated in the subversion of some of the most cherished convictions of the Enlightenment even before they had been fully worked out. Thirty years on, the strength of Berlin’s ...”

“... us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’ Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement ...”

“... would throw him off course. He fell back on the founding Dakar-Djibouti discovery: the Dogon of Mali, a relatively isolated people with dazzling origin myths and a fastidious, poetic sense of interaction with the ancestors – real and mythic – which came to a pitch of expression at funerals and mask festivals. Deaths among the Dogon, a poor, unmedicated ...”

“... story of the descendants of Dousika and Diemogo, aristocratic brothers in Ségou (in modern-day Mali), the capital of the Bambara empire, in the late 18th century. The characters move about, losing their families and friends, acquiring new ones, their affiliations constantly shifting. The epigraph – ‘do not speak of Segu in Segu’ – indicates that ...”

“... on the islands. Being, as he said, too busy to look into the matter himself, he commissioned Joseph Burtt, a middle-aged utopian who had abandoned banking to live in a commune in Gloucestershire, to go on his behalf. The commune had begun to falter, and Burtt was casting around for a purpose in life to match his idealism. The anti-slavery movement fitted ...”

“... now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low ...”

“... our Western partners to get off the ground’, as President Sassou N’Guesso still complains. In Mali, the scheme of irrigating 1.2 million hectares – a target set long ago by the French coloniser – no longer seems a mirage; in 2011, Ghana obtained $3 billion, the first tranche of a $13 billion loan package that itself surpassed the World Bank’s ...”

“... still present in the book seven hundred pages later. René Sel marries a Mi’kmaw woman called Mali (really Mari, but she can’t manage the ‘r’ sound), a happy union even if the idea was not his. René’s master, rising in the world, made an advantageous marriage and wanted to regularise his household by passing on his previous mistress to someone ...”

“... on human presence in the traditional Mbari art and contrasts this with its absence in the works of Joseph Conrad.’ Well, is there no ‘human presence’ in works like Nostromo or even Lord Jim? This is not the kind of critical biography which, by offering a certain description of a life, can transform our perception of the work. On the contrary, it asks ...”

“... military involvement was a good idea. The secretary of defense Robert Gates, the vice president Joseph Biden and the former Nato commander Wesley Clark were all opposed, while Clinton, the UN ambassador Susan Rice and national security council aide Samantha Power urged action. Obama was typically reluctant to commit either way. There were good reasons for ...”

“... while travelling through Algeria. One morning in the camp, a giant of a man from Cameroon called Joseph announced that Algeria might be a dangerous place for Algerians, but ‘not for us blacks’. He couldn’t say why – ‘perhaps it’s something in the Koran.’ Joseph was 25. He had crossed most of the Sahara on ...”