Citations

Why did the French version of “Capital” not make the same splash? One review last year, in the left-leaning Libération newspaper, suggested that the book was not left-wing enough. There is no discussion, lamented the author,...

Last year a BBC documentary about the war in Bosnia showed the town of Travnik besieged by Bosnian Serbs. Conditions in the town were dismal; hunger and fortitude were the order of the day. The programme was watched by 1.8...

But it’s not just the surfeit of stuff repeating the most recent auction experiments—Italian Arte Povera here, the Japanese Zero artists there, and there, and there again—that tips one off to the rightward turn of contemporary...

This was not written in any quiet space. I wrote it in pretty much every café in Minneapolis. I wrote it at a train station, I wrote it when I was on tour for Night Women. I wrote it with music playing all the time. The window...

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody wrote a short essay saying, “What did communism do for us?” I remember Octavio Paz said that communism might have been the wrong answer, but it wasn’t the wrong question. Because we decided the...

The more bass you have, the less you can get on vinyl. We have to think of vinyl nowadays because everybody is buying vinyl again.

The dogs are generally more Ward’s concern than Dawkins’s; he is not hugely interested in animals.

Identifying such cheats was easy, the smugglers said, because real red mercury is attracted to gold but repelled by garlic.

“My life has been one long descent into respectability,” she once remarked.

In a previous column I noted that the use of the word “methinks” was a sign to stop reading.