“... On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger had passed. Parma, with a powerful army, was still there in ...”

“... beat the human Go master.* Sometimes I get angry at my car’s satnav device: she seems to me a little too prissy and self-satisfied, and thinks she knows best how to get around my own town. (I don’t think of her as stupid, just as having an agenda of her own.) These things have a deep history, and Jessica Riskin’s wide-ranging, witty and astonishingly ...”

“... thought of murder as misreading. The signs may be either outlandish or mundane. I come now to a little touch of Shakespeare in the later literature of the supernatural. When the Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades ...”

“... First Family contains its own underappreciated RINO: George H.W. Bush. Conviction politics played little part in the career of the senior Bush, who had a reputation for being ‘somewhat to the centre of centre’. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see him as a man without principles. An upright Yankee, his career in Texas notwithstanding, he inherited ...”

“... in the notion of Baudelaire as an ‘icon of modernity’, yet Baudelaire’s own writings betray little enthusiasm for progress or the future: ‘Poetry and progress,’ he observed, ‘are two ambitious men that hate each other, with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet along a pathway one or other must give way.’ But it was exactly Baudelaire’s ...”

“... American publisher were more than he could refuse. Rider Haggard killed his most popular hero in Allan Quatermain (1887) and was then obliged, by popular request, to bring him back for 14 later episodes. Presumably, when Bram Stoker decapitated Dracula at the end of his 1897 novel, he fondly expected that to be the end of it. But the dead ghoul became the ...”

“... of short stories, but in their uncertain state they are of interest mainly to scholars and hold little appeal for the ordinary reader, who invariably comes to Lowry after discovering the masterful Under the Volcano, in the hope that there will be more of the same. There isn’t, and knowing this, Hofmann wisely gives us only excerpts from the rest. His ...”

“... fingers had swollen – she was six months pregnant. This wasn’t merely torture, the activist Allan Boesak recalled, but a ‘demonstration’. The attackers – it is believed – were from the Security Police, specifically the notorious ‘Hammer Unit’, whose members used their own personal weapons and would drive into the townships ‘dressed as ...”

“... observers had perceived a barren wilderness.’ He found numerous hitherto unknown works and little-known artists, and was able to do this by virtue of ‘a breadth of experience which he alone possessed, after many years of scrutinising pictures in private collections and the sale rooms, and of collecting information from catalogues, archives and ...”

“... mystery of “origination”’ to be ‘one of the great creative forces’, and had little interest in revealing the truth about a father who turns out to have been a maritally entangled commercial traveller and the black sheep of a respectable Glasgow family. Bundling up her infant, Janet withdrew from Blairgowrie to the Spittal of ...”

“... his time in California, Crary taught at UC San Diego, where he met the performance artists Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin, whose work he discussed in terms derived from Henri Lefebvre, the first theorist of ‘everyday life’, and Deleuze and Guattari, who celebrated ‘nomadic’ ways of being. Crary describes Kaprow as troubling ‘the differences ...”

“... about his famous mentor and the thanatological work on which they collaborated, but he gets a little carried away when he says, about the reception given to On Death and Dying, that it was ‘as if the event of death had not occurred’ before the book was published in 1969. Emerson, writing his journal in January 1842 as a newly bereaved father, seems ...”

“... state unburdened by high salaries for civil and military officers. This meant that there was little pressure to reform positions that depended on the collection of fees; it also ensured a general tolerance of the petty corruption practised by needy customs officers. Seventeenth-century republican demands for selfless officials working under the scrutiny ...”

“... Yengeni (an African and an SACP member) into standing aside to allow the Coloured ex-clergyman, Allan Boesak, to assume the ANC chairmanship of the region. This was hotly resented by local Coloured Communists such as Cheryl Carolus and Trevor Manuel – for Boesak is a high liver, much given to expensive houses, cars and restaurants. However, despite the ...”

“... Yeah, I do. I think that was a very great, great mistake.Buckley: Well, I hope to give you a little solace in the course of the evening, but the reason I do raise this and I rejoice in your disposition to argue the Vietnam question especially when I recognise what an act of self-control this must involve.Chomsky: It does, sure, it really does. I mean, I ...”