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“... some of the more significant snatches of dialogue, as when Barley Blair says he is the wrong man, and his controller replies: ‘We’re all the wrong men. We’re dealing with wrong things.’ Readers looking for a spy novel may be disappointed. This is a book about a spy-world, a metaphor for the leaky transparent world we have made – Le Carré ...”

“... rhythms and what Leonard calls ‘glitzy crap’. This glitz was the leading feature of Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface, with its play on luminous surfaces in which blood, neon and Miami sunsets finally merge into a single crimson garishness. The same glitz features in the current TV hit, Miami Vice. Mafiosi are usually portrayed as dressing like ...”

“... on the origin of the modern world in tracing the emergence of what he came to call ‘desiring man’ to a point between the late 17th and the 18th century, with antecedents in the specialised confessional disciplines of Christian monastic life. He discerned in the age of reason a new, sinister shift of interest to the sexuality of children and ‘the ...”

“... one by one. Still, the effect is there, and this is a lot of travail in only three years, and the man who said ‘my own aim is to suppress my own biography’ is clearly writing his own pre-emptive life story: he is the man who suffered, the man who did too much, the ...”

“... Kristeva’s​ book on Dostoevsky appears in a series from Buchet/Chastel called ‘Les Auteurs de ma vie’. Earlier titles included works by Stefan Zweig on Tolstoy, Thomas Mann on Schopenhauer, Paul Valéry on Descartes, and contributions from living writers such as Marie-Hélène Lafon (on Flaubert) and Michel ...”

“... other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower. The most amazing thing about their story is not the spectacular rise in the family fortunes, nor the transition ...”

“... Afew hours​ after Jean-Paul Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses ...”

“... arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second ...”

“... world stands with them in order to diminish their unhappiness, and there are those at the Collège de France who labour under no such necessity. This cult of the negative is no doubt as much the legacy of Mallarmé as it is of the death camps. Saussure’s celebrated claim that there is nothing positive in language was made long before the Holocaust. The ...”

“... facts have parted company but that opinion takes precedence. The first scene: I’m walking beside Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda and then a rebel leader, past low picket fences and small prefabricated houses in a residential suburb of Brussels. It’s cold and our breath mingles in the air as we speak. Kagame is swaddled in a thick coat. Even ...”

“... are fatally compromised by their taking place in a zone which, linguistically, is already no man’s land. The result is that Landolfi’s flaky humour is reduced to mere facetiousness, his parody to imitation, and his complex sadomasochistic role-play to a gratuitous sexist nastiness. The earlier stories, which have more substance, fare somewhat better ...”

“... revolution. The French Revolution unleashed a reactionary critique of secret societies. Augustin de Barruel’s widely translated Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1797) traced a triad of conspiracies – of philosophes, Freemasons and Illuminati – which lay behind the assault on the Ancien Régime. English Masonry, however, unlike the ...”

“... politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as such: ‘an acknowledgment of the right of the Irish people to determine their own future without interference from the British ...”

“... savant, bearded and unkempt, who stares out at the camera with weary, if aggressive, confidence. Paul Strathern starts his history of chemistry, Mendeleev’s Dream, with a description of one such photograph, seeing in this ‘genius professor’ the modern successor of ‘a Siberian shaman’, a ‘new kind of messiah’. Peter Atkins, a university chemist ...”

“... about things’. The end leaves no room for doubt, for the book actually splits into two voices, a man’s and a young woman’s. The conversation between them finally comes to rest on the question of oracles as forums for talking about hopes and fears – not banishing them, but ‘getting along with them’. Even this is not quite a conclusion: ‘So what ...”