“... One was the comparative study of values in five adjacent, mostly colonised, cultures in the North American South-West. The other was the Russian Research Center, which, Geertz wryly recalls, employed ‘social scientific techniques (refugee interviewing, content analysis) in an effort to penetrate, and foil, Soviet intentions.’ Grandiose and expensive ...”

“... took to locking the door to her room. He tried to evict her from their house; and she finally fled north to her parents after he had dragged her from the drawing room in the presence of Augusta and his cousin, George Byron, quite possibly with the intention of killing her. Alcoholic, frighteningly destructive and arguably insane, the poet had reached the nadir ...”

“... later by Queeney, by then happily married to Baron Keith of Stonehaven Marischal, Admiral of the North Sea Fleet, was that ‘it was from original and persevering dislike and real hatred of us all, from her hatred of our father, and certainly her general conduct to the whole family strongly savours of that nature.’ Such is the material Bainbridge draws on ...”

“... has a longer reach than the Longman, which for copyright reasons is not yet available outside North America. Yet, like Heaney’s subtly ‘Hiberno-English’ translation of Beowulf, the Norton has never abandoned its roots. The footnotes translating ‘rounders’ as ‘baseball’ might once have limited the anthology’s sphere of influence, but ...”

“... The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnston County airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractors Ltd, a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyne, a legendary CIA officer and a former chief pilot for Air America. The airport is convenient for nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special ...”

“... of the middle-class former student George Matthews as his successor and insist on the worker John Gollan. Some twenty years later the industrial organisers of the Party were a Canadian lawyer and the son of an academic, and no adequately qualified worker could be found to take up the post of district secretary for the Party’s most industrial ...”

“... out against Maya groups. ‘In Guatemala,’ Hagerty says, ‘forensic students from Europe and North America can see more bodies in a few weeks than in a year back home. Guatemala has so many dead.’ The tone of the book is by turns unsparing – Guatemala is a useful place to learn forensic techniques; Hagerty has to teach herself not to retch on seeing ...”

“... early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its themes. The books of the first twenty years ...”

“... a baby was born to a woman who had received a uterus from a deceased donor, a feat repeated in North America last June, giving reproductive hope to trans women who want to carry children of their own. So far, at least, it seems that a womb is still necessary to bring a baby into being, though researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have ...”

“... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... Godot. Maybe this time he shows up.Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita’am. John Mearsheimer The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the ...”

“... the sky, the house at Willowglen, set against a western hill and facing an eastern hill, with the north boundary of hawthorn hedge, may trees, willow trees, had only brief sun in the morning, making the house cool even in summer, but if you looked from the cool and often cold world of the house you’d see, down on the flat by the creek and beyond it, a world ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”