“... specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie ...”

“... Blanche Patch, for her part, considered that he was a man ‘at peace with himself’. Another major topic in the present Letters is his love-affair with Mrs Patrick Campbell in 1912-13, and here his style strikes me as less effective. The clowning in his letters is funny enough – only Shaw could have written to his romantic beloved: ‘You turned a cold ...”

“... approach. The most notable example is the great contribution to the theory of justice presented by John Rawls, who pioneered the revival of the contractarian approach, but has increasingly stressed the universalist concerns of a Kantian concept of ‘the person’ (especially in his 1980 Dewey Lectures*). The recent emergence of the so-called ‘Bob Geldof ...”

“... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an ...”

“... Courage in Profiles or a feminist film called The Woman Lieutenant’s Frenchman. But there are no major tumbles, and I was still laughing at the end. But is there a novel in all this? There are no characters, and no plot, no sudden reappearances of Widmerpool or horribly inappropriate reminders of Winterwade. But there is a situation which is almost ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... however, let his people off too lightly, particularly the ‘successful men’ he admits are his major concern, as it is their monuments to God and to themselves which survive for us to admire. He lets off the uncivilised Normans, with whom the book begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came ...”

“... cultural ascendancy was beginning. These artists – George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows – had all (Bellows apart) started out in the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his ...”

“... mechanism of a phenomenon is very different from being able to mitigate its impact. The physicist John Tyndall identified the greenhouse effect in 1860, but generations of scientists have failed to instigate reforms that might slow it down. Perhaps it would be better to focus not on explaining the science, but on exposing the political and industrial ...”

“... the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his flock of sheep and oxen; in the evenings, they retired to estates built on acres of quiet pasture just outside the city, with names like De Ribbe (the Rib) or De Ijseren Verckens (the Iron Pigs), Dlammeken (the Little Lamb) or ’t ...”

“... summary of the man, emphasising the significance of the Americas to him, and to his final, major accomplishment. Scientific expeditions proliferated during Humboldt’s lifetime: they aimed at assessing territory for European empires, as well as collecting specimens and artefacts for museums, and theories for savants. Humboldt was a newborn when ...”

“... of there. He thinks that’s very funny, as if I’m under the impression I’ve just shared some major revelation. He used to laugh at me like that in class when I was teaching. There’s a poll in a recent New York Times, buried in the middle of section A, where nearly all of the important news is to be found in the Times, usually below the fold. It ...”

“... that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as language, whereas longer poems tend to be remembered for their overall structure or patterning, or for the occasional quote’, his other ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and really the only reason for reading the book: an almost excessively interestingly put-together figure, full of stylistic tics, who blends English and German, business-speak and deadpan, vanity and piffle. Like ...”