“... Clint Eastwood, and the point of my description is to suggest, however sketchily, just how much may be going on in any movie that’s any good. The programme of Perez’s book is to say the same thing, but not sketchily, and across a very wide range of films; and the central argument of David Bordwell’s book is ...”

“... official line in Havana is that when the incumbent’s current five-year term is up, in 1998, he may pass his official duties on to younger successors. He would then have ruled Cuba for forty years, retiring at the age of 71. (Joaquín Balaguer, in the adjoining Dominican Republic, though blind, was last year re-elected President for the sixth time, at the ...”

“... so again in the 19th century, but the practice was unusual in the 17th and 18th centuries. This may seem surprising, because it is striking how well paintings of this period look in frames made at the same date. Meticulous depictions of flowers or sober Dutch wives in crisp white ruffs arc happiest bound by hard sharp dark mouldings with a taut skin of ...”

“... national essence from the one which has penetrated so deep into their modern psyche that it may never be successfully extracted. Maybe the uncomfortable truth will always be resisted. But a nationalism did emerge, thanks mainly to the Reformation. Until then, the Isles remained intimately bonded with the mainland. Davies elaborates for this earlier ...”

“... the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality tale of the Cold War. Scholars may talk as they please, constructing complex patterns of interpretation for a minority audience: the popular ground has been won by the Chapman Pincher school of history, with its attendant band of novelists, journalists and politicians. The message they bear is ...”

“... Herr Doktor muses, reversing the statement.) While agreeing that ‘a polemical situation may be the moving force behind thought,’ Debray declares that ‘the pamphlet is a degrading genre at odds with any ethics of knowledge.’ In the event, Debray pays scant regard to ‘Scientific analysis’, and despite a few, almost decorative statistical ...”

“... While too little equality results in too little freedom, the active promotion of total equality may, he acknowledges, actually inhibit the freedom that greater equality is intended to make possible. The relationship of the two conditions can be envisaged as a curve, with freedom increasing with the promotion of equality up to a point, but then starting to ...”

“... the back or the lid of a small panel painting – would merit this sort of exegesis, but here they may not. Lightbown is as keen to expand on the historical events, recorded in published and in manuscript sources, which provided the occasion for Mantegna’s paintings as he is to investigate the objects depicted in them, and this, also, is often of great ...”

“... group to restrict itself to fighting in Iraq – a suggestion Isis rejected out of hand. Zawahiri may now have some regrets but he also knows that Baghdadi may eventually fail – because of his reliance on extreme violence if for no other reason. It was a lesson al-Qaida learned the hard way. September 11 had set the bar ...”

“... On​ 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself ...”

“... Farrell told Kate Andersen Brower that he got a sense when he was with her of how ‘magical it may have been to have loved her in a romantic way’. Taylor said he was a ‘true Celt’ and reminded her of Burton. When he visited to give her a volume of Yeats, she kept him waiting for an hour before emerging in a wheelchair, her hair ‘as high as the ...”

“... from recent prods to produce work of greater scope. In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage worry that the production of scholarly miniatures disqualifies historians from contributing to urgent cultural and political discussions – about climate change, sustainable production, international governance etc – in which the longue durée ...”

“... of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower. The recent Middle East peace conference in Madrid may therefore come to be seen as a watershed. With the Cold War over and the Gulf War won, President George Bush and James Baker, his Secretary of State, have adopted an attitude which the Israelis find so alarmingly even-handed that they have begun to suspect ...”

“... it summons up which shows that the Palliser thesis is only half-right. For decades, the people may have been ignorant, but the politicians were not. This Falklands retrospective was commissioned by BBC Radio, and the interviews it prints with many of the major participants on both sides contain much material that could not be broadcast, the first import of ...”

“... significantly different under Thatcher from what they were under Asquith and Lloyd George. This may seem a curious observation to make in the aftermath of a Conservative Budget which has reduced the marginal rate of income tax for even the richest of the idle rich to 40 per cent while numbers of the poor are left in the trap of marginal rates of 85 per cent ...”