“... is some suspicion that his plea to funding Hamas, which cost him nothing in prison time, may have been a ruse to bolster the credibility of the prosecution case.) In return, he got seven and a half years instead of a potential life sentence, with a promise of further reductions if he continued to ‘co-operate’. His credibility was heavily ...”

“... loss and being run over by cars and off-road vehicles severely affect their numbers, the ravens may be a worse danger still. The birds have become what the wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a ‘subsidised species’, meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house-cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around ...”

“... schools. In their collection of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval ...”

“... but the book was also filled with examples of that attractive canny madness which R.D. Laing and David Cooper were analysing as higher wisdom. Stigma told me about the nature of outsiders, ways of not belonging which redeemed my sense of not belonging, and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life made sense of more or less everything, but especially the ...”

“... story of two sisters from 19th-century Manchester: Ally becomes a pioneering doctor in Cornwall; May dies tragically young in Scotland (Night Waking also includes a contemporary narrative about maternal stress and sleeplessness but is equally indebted to archival research). The Tidal Zone also has an historical underpinning, with interludes on the bombing of ...”

“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer ...”

“... Die Abwicklung der DDR, show British diplomacy in a particularly sorry light.) To this catalogue may be added the Government’s obstructive posturing on European integration, its confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a ...”

“... If the past is another country where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you ...”

“... displacement of people in Arab-dominated areas taken from IS, especially around Kirkuk. The KDP may succeed in pushing IS out of these areas and may even help retake Mosul, but if Washington fails to rein in the KDP’s territorial ambitions it is likely to find that the phenomenon of Sunni Arab radicalisation that ...”

“... Responsibility of Intellectuals’ (1967). ‘The question “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves,’ Chomsky wrote, ‘as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defence of freedom.’ Chomsky’s route to this position began with his ...”

“... is, I think, Bishop’s final formal representation of literature as sheer ongoingness. The bus may be flowing, but it is never flown. And the sharp demarcation of the word ‘historical’, so final in ‘At the Fishhouses’, has given way to a concept altogether less angular – the grandparents, out of time at last, talking in that Eternity which is ...”

“... months after Giraud arrived on Ile de France. As soon as he stepped off the boat from France in May 1777 Giraud was placed in chains and confined to prison. On 15 August, in the late afternoon, he and another prisoner, a young boy named Cézar, were digging a trench close to the island’s administrative headquarters. Giraud and Cézar were chained ...”

“... By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946 ...”

“... maintained a discreet and sad silence. By a happy contrast, just a week earlier, Theresa May had underscored the government’s à la carte approach to human rights when she embraced other judgments of the European Court in deciding to intervene to stop the hacker Gary McKinnon being sent to the US, because to do so ‘would give rise to such a high ...”