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“... 1992 so that he could be present during the execution of a mentally retarded young man in Little Rock. I wish I believed that reading some of the descriptions in this book would cause him to reflect. They would clearly not impress Attorney General Bob Butterworth of Florida. Commenting on a recent case in which the mask of an electrocuted man caught ...”

“... new elite to hold on to power. Anyone who is unhappy can leave, rather than staying behind to rock the boat: far from being frightened that the disgruntled will vote with their feet, Putin and Co welcome it, because it secures their hold on power. This is the big difference between Putin’s Russia and its Soviet predecessor, which was terrified of ...”

“... but instead they look a bit tacky and amateurish: middle-aged, mothballed Thunderbird puppets. As David Stubbs puts it in Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014), there is ‘the air of belonging to some bygone astronaut era, veterans of an abandoned space project.’ The fact that Kraftwerk have produced so little since the ...”

“... of animated nature into vocal praise: Ye Fish assume a Voice, with Praises fill The hollow Rock, and loud reactive Hill. Let Lions with their Roar their Thanks express, With Acclamations shake the Wilderness ... Apart from the great hymn-writers, the most engaging religious poets of the early 18th century can often seem to be the numerous but now ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”

“... David Keenan’s​ first novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-86 (2017), documents the rise and fall of a fictitious (though awesomely real) band called Memorial Device. Its members are from Keenan’s home town of Airdrie – about thirteen miles east of Glasgow – and the book takes the form of 26 testimonies from band members, friends, jilted lovers, relatives, hangers-on and rival acts ...”

“... had been on the two earlier expeditions. He was acknowledged as one of the better British rock climbers and had proved himself at high altitude. Andrew Irvine was 22 and had no Himalayan experience, but he was adept at repairing oxygen apparatus, or what the expedition’s Sherpas laughingly referred to as ‘English air’. On his earlier ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... and asserting an imperial idea that once flourished in many places, but which now clings to the Rock of Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and parts of the north-east counties of Ireland. The Gibraltar equivalent of Sir Joseph Cairns is a politician called Sir Joshua Hassan who believes that the Rock is indissolubly part of ...”

“... nowhere to be found. And so, this past summer, when I boarded a fast boat to Capri – that famous rock where Lenin and Adorno hiked, and where now those who can afford prices set for Russian oligarchs shop – I was not immune to the prospect that the good-looking captain in his tight white slacks might throw us to the sharks. I had decided that it is the ...”

“... they must strive for it themselves, not wait for the gentry to give it to them – these are the rock on which the Labour Party was built, and it was these who Clem not only represented, but came to personify ... Starting with conventional middle-class – and working-class – beliefs in king, Country and Empire, he had the vision to see how these ideas ...”

“... the up-do, the bouncing bob, the scrape-back and the Arkanfro, and has settled for a traditional, rock-solid, Oval Office quiff, the kind of hairstyle that looks like it might survive a nuclear winter. Is this what Joyce meant by metempsychosis – the transmigration of souls? Some, it turns out, have a further distance to migrate than others. One of ...”

“... in Beijing an unprecedented group of works of art (paintings, textiles, porcelain, even a great rock from the imperial gardens), as the tribute of one age of prosperity to another. It would be easy, too, to see some contemporary parallels: the high Qing was an era of the firmest possible central control over the lands of Islamic Central Asia and Tibet; its ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”