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“... The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does not want his fingerprints taken and, unlike like most European critics of the evil empire, he has been willing to forego an academic visit to the United States in order to prevent it happening. What is at stake, he explains, is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state ...”

“... One​ way to get a perspective on the contemporary art world is to look at two databases, Artprice and Artfacts, which provide rankings of artists based on saleroom prices and exhibition exposure respectively. When I first did this more than ten years ago, the artist who came out on top, outperforming all other living artists when the rankings were combined, was Gerhard Richter ...”

“... They want him back. They always have, but now they want him more than ever: living in Rome for almost his entire career was one thing, posthumous residence in England is another. That the artist ‘qui incame le XVIIe siècle français’ should have become (as Olivier Bonfait’s essay in the Paris catalogue describes him) ‘un objet totalement “anglo-saxon” ’ is seen as a source of national shame ...”

“... During the high tide of theory in the early Eighties, René Girard was the critic who received most honour in his own country and least in the Anglo-Saxon world. As early as 1981, the year before the publication of Le Bouc émissaire (The Scapegoat), his most accessible book, Girard, a professor at Stanford, was at number 14 in the magazine Lire’s hitparade of French intellectuals, while Derrida and Baudrillard were not even in the top 40 ...”

“... It was in 1982 that the artist then still known as Prince first invited us to ‘party like it’s 1999’, and in those days everyone quickly grasped what he meant. The Cold War made people edgy (‘Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?’) and it seemed quite possible that we might wake up one morning and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K ...”

“... Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them, but also bring my venture to a premature end. Reflecting that few are lucky enough to be in a position to do the job themselves, I could either confine myself to advocacy, or else embark on the difficult and protracted business of getting into a position in which I could expect others to obey my orders ...”

“... For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with rising temperatures, while natural causes of global warming have remained constant ...”

“... Forget Bob Geldof, Bono and the other do-gooders, Genoa’s only significance was as the latest battle in the war of Neoliberalism. It was a clear victory this time for the ‘anarchists’. Damaging property and street fighting proved the most effective forms of protest, and provoked an over-reaction from the police: they shot a man armed with a fire extinguisher and raided the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum for no reason ...”

“... You never know​ what Malcolm Bull will come up with next. He is the least predictable of authors, as well as one of the most versatile. What other political theorist can write about Zoroastrianism, the Book of Enoch, medieval prophecy, the perception of colour, animal magnetism and the politics of sleep? There is scarcely a major philosopher from Heraclitus to Martha Nussbaum whose work Bull hasn’t made inventive use of, though Freud is a curious absence ...”

“... Malcolm Bull has written a formidable handbook, for which, I predict, many scholars and lovers of Renaissance art will never forgive him. What he has to say in the end about the revival of the ancient gods in early modern Europe amounts to a wholesale (Savonarolan) bonfire of most art historians’ assumptions, or wishes, about the leaven of paganism in the transition to modernity ...”

“... only to those not on the receiving end, and often operating apparently on the wrong patients. Malcolm Bull has recently explored the slippery implications and latent paradoxes of genocide and its definitions: that it might be more likely to be perpetrated by democracies, for example, and thus can be construed as a symptom of democracy’s bad ...”

“... could also be understood. Clark once called the young Greenberg an ‘Eliotic Trotskyite’, and Malcolm Bull referred to the Clark of Farewell to an Idea, also oxymoronically, as a ‘Greenbergian Situationist’. Neither term applies to this book, but an equally contradictory formulation is needed. If These Apples Should Fall follows Farewell to an ...”

“... in the shadow of Mount Lamentation. He arrives more or less insane and carrying a gold figure of a bull. His father now worships Mithras, and there’s a bull in the carriage barn, so it’s a good choice of offering (earlier the barn’s occupant was a Barbary ape called Heracles, disembowelled and crucified by the reverend ...”

“... leading public officials, including the Birmingham public safety commissioner, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor, who ordered the police to withdraw from the station minutes before the Riders arrived. A few days later, when the Riders, bandaged and nervous, moved on to Montgomery, Alabama’s capitol, they once again faced violence. At the Montgomery bus ...”

“... double involves extensive whipping of Lumb’s bald head and the sacrifice of an enormous white bull. The scene combines the lineaments of a modern torture chamber – a windowless room, a concrete floor, unnamed men wielding whips ‘hard and heavy as a lump of wire cable’ and brandishing electrified clubs – with the arcane rituals of a primitive ...”