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“... flannels’ – but are also exemplars of British understatement, and peppered with English schoolboy slang: ‘awfully’, ‘topping’, ‘top hole’. He was born in San Francisco on 2 August 1897; his parents were Josephine Harker Fernald and Chester Bailey Fernald, a popular playwright. Chester could write anywhere, so the family moved ...”

“... blankets, sang a refrain: ‘There is hunger in Palestine/there is no hunger in Palestine.’ Richard Cook, a director at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration, said to Azoulay that arbitrary, banal impediments to food supplies were jeopardising the nutritional health of many Palestinians.After 7 October 2023, the Israeli government narrowed its ...”

“... Amendment. Chief Justice Hughes, who wrote the opinion, devoted much of it to a discussion of English legal history: the struggle against licensing of the press, and Blackstone’s conclusion that the liberty of the press meant putting no previous restraints or publication. But then Hughes turned to James Madison’s words about the need for open public ...”

“... head, which is empirically false. On the other hand, it only re-creates the same difficulty when Richard Dawkins goes to the other extreme and, having dismissed Wynne-Edwards more or less out of hand in favour of genes as the units of natural selection, identifies the unit of social selection as any item of cultural transmission capable of replication, from ...”

“... which served to distinguish him from his companions (Elisabeth Becker of the Washington Post and Richard Dudman from the St Louis Post-Dispatch). As a Scottish nationalist, he wrote that he found DK’s wish to ‘make new things Cambodian’ quite sympathetic – yet far too crudely and chauvinistically anti-Vietnamese. This sentiment, Kiernan notes, was ...”

“... at risk is us. The reason for that is that in the UK bank assets are 492 per cent of GDP. In plain English, our banks are five times bigger than our entire economy. (When the Icelandic and Cypriot banking systems collapsed the respective figures were 880 and 700 per cent.) We know from the events of 2008 and subsequently that the financial sector, indeed the ...”

“... Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox when other officials in the Justice Department refused to obey Richard Nixon’s order. He deliberately turned his Senate hearings into ‘a discussion of judicial philosophy’, with the aim of exposing the modern heresies that had brought the Warren and Burger Courts to such jurisprudential absurdities as Roe v. Wade. He ...”

“... one which invariably resembled his own.’ He receives an A+ in Lionel Trilling’s course on the English Romantics, literary criticism’s closest thing to a baptism of the holy spirit. From Columbia, Podhoretz, destined for distinction in the finest dojos of literary training, continues his studies at Cambridge, where the fearsome F.R. Leavis and his ...”

“... seemsA modern ecstasy.14 January. When I am occasionally stumped on a grammatical point, having no English grammar, I consult a copy of Kennedy’s Latin primer, filched more than thirty years ago from Giggleswick School. It’s only today that I notice that some schoolboy half a lifetime ago has painstakingly converted The Revised Latin Primer into ‘The ...”

“... What is the reward for knowing the worst?Donald Barthelme, Snow WhiteWhen Richard Rorty​ wrote, in one of his many familiar pragmatist pronouncements, that the only way you can tell if something is true is if it helps you get the life you want, it sounded either like a provocative assertion or another advertisement, masquerading as epistemology, for consumer capitalism ...”

“... is condemned by the Koran and there is no room for interpretation.’ When it was discovered that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a British Muslim, more than a hundred mosques and Islamic centres were visited by the police. ‘Do you have any relations with the Taliban?’ was one opening gambit used to win over law-abiding Muslims to the cause of the ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... piety of the ‘God-shaped hole’ and any regard for ‘genuine, devotional attachment’. In an English PEN statement for Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, he spoke out frankly for impiety: ‘Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.’ The solidarity appropriate to believers in free ...”

“... the political spectrum: Noel Malcolm of All Souls, editor of Leviathan for Oxford, on the right; Richard Tuck of Harvard, author of the finest contextualisation of Hobbes’s thought, on the left. Differing in outlook in so many ways, their convergence on Brexit is all the more arresting. For Malcolm, who intervened in 1991 before the Treaty of Maastricht ...”

“... the Sikhs and the other the British. With the first Indian war of independence in 1857 (known in English history books as the Mutiny) there was the same division. I used to think, cynically, that the top echelons of the family did this deliberately: support both sides so that whichever faction of the ruling class wins, the family never loses. That was often ...”