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“... of the population had read at least one of the Astérix books; and by the time of Goscinny’s death total sales in France are said to have amounted to more than 55 million copies, putting Astérix substantially ahead of his main (Belgian) rival, Tintin. The first French space satellite, launched in 1965, was named in his honour (the US later matched ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”

“... it was assembled … Look at it here, flying on the page, vying with light.’ Behold, Werner’s sacramental tone urges, a saint’s relic, a fragment blessed with mystic powers, miraculously rising from the sacred site of the archive. The complex nature of this archive was well captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham ...”

“... Iraq and Palestine are inadequately subsumed in a chapter curiously entitled ‘Britain’s Informal Empire in the Middle East’. In the first volume, on Imperial ‘origins’, there are ground-breaking contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship ...”

“... deciding to reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire. 8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the jacarandas, but my husband, Jason, was seeing them for the first time, in ...”

“... In​ Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, published in January, the UK fell to twentieth place, its lowest ever ranking. It’s not hard to see why: a Conservative government mired in allegations of corruption; billions of pounds in Covid contracts for politically connected VIPs; peerages doled out to Tory donors; public bodies stuffed with party cronies ...”

“... bliss. The first time I’ve been on a train without a nanny or a husband!’ Ariel’s language is a joy. About meeting Hitler she remarks: I was pregnant at the time so I wasn’t feeling very … brisk. Hitler said, “I only have four words in a foreign language,” the four words being: “Vous êtes mon ...”

“... that these details suggest, of exile and nostalgia, is more pertinent than the data of Agee’s education, employment, marriages. He enjoyed wide recognition and often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic ...”

“... to be ignored, to tell us the prospectus, like the prospect, was a hoax. None of Joan Didion’s books has been long, exactly, not with the generous amounts of white space she provides, which serve as fresh linen and air conditioning after a day’s driving in the desert, some respite from the perils. But air ...”

“... in the long decade of 1872-84 were born Marcel Mauss (1872), Alfred Kroeber (1876), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881), and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884), with Ruth Benedict (1887) at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont ...”

“... we have left behind. But the headlong momentum of the broken road, endured in a foetal crouch for so many miles, is swiftly absorbed when our modestly recompensed Asháninka hosts climb from their benches to greet and process the latest off-highway time travellers eager not only to witness but to participate in the old ways of the high jungle and ...”

“... of Idi Amin, who had seized the presidency in a coup the previous year. The expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, estimated at seventy thousand, was announced in August; we were given three months to leave. Around twenty thousand had Ugandan citizenship. Roughly the same number had applied for citizenship, but their applications remained unprocessed – a ...”

“... on a different planet went wrong in the same way the old world did?’ People who don’t like SF think of it as a genre obsessed with techy-fetishistic questions: ‘What if the C9-G series intergalactic cruiser with the Krank mod could go faster than lightspeed?’ Or as posing the kind of bloodless questions asked by philosophical thought ...”

“... the provisioning of ships and processing of sugar, was accepted as an important part of England’s wealth. Slavery, itself associated with Africa and the Americas, happened elsewhere. Britons, proud of their liberties, ‘never shall be slaves’: slavery was a condition for others. But by the 1760s there were the beginnings of a growth in anti-slavery ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”