“... you come to feel that the characters are really doing something quite old-fashioned. They may be media savvy and product-articulate, these yellow-faced goons, but in essence they go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people rolling in the aisles of the music halls. Homer Simpson is a kind of Grimaldi, an air-guitar-playing, nacho-chomping ...”

“... was the absence of testimony by agents. Yet written materials of sufficient quantity and authority may have a credibility that only the most reliable of witnesses could claim. The committee staff reviewed more than six million pages of CIA documents, while also drawing on an earlier CIA inspector general’s report. A wrangle over agency requests for ...”

“... cash for clothes and clubbing. The young with the energy to get out of their beds, that is. In May 2011, two days before the election, I could find not one poster in a window, not one canvasser on a sunny street. And yet each lamppost was decorated with little flags for each of the four contesting parties – as if the council had been told to mark the ...”

“... When they face a crisis, it is dangerous for banks to have debtors take a hit. To do so may scare the horses, risking a stampede of deposits out of the door. Debtor discipline then has the effect of making a bad situation worse. Extended liability was abolished for just that reason. And the complex debt instruments issued by banks a hundred years ...”

“... did serious damage to Russia’s interests: ‘The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the south-east of Ukraine.’ No wonder Stalin’s ...”

“... of the hotel worker Baha Mousa in September 2003, and another into incidents that occurred in May 2004 at a British army base north of Basra, while a third inquiry has been requested on behalf of 102 other Iraqi citizens. Since Cameron’s announcement WikiLeaks has suggested that there may well be 15,000 hitherto ...”

“... and art, according to Nietzsche, is the best veil (‘We have art,’ he remarked, ‘that we may not perish of the truth’). Fundamentally we are disgusted by life, and we are paralysed by this disgust when and if we acknowledge it. What Nietzsche calls the Dionysian, Critchley and Webster usefully suggest, is ‘the introduction of a kind of lethargy ...”

“... On a summer morning in late May or early June of 415 BCE, the inhabitants of Athens woke to the discovery that the city’s numerous Herms – images of Hermes consisting of a square-cut stone pillar topped by a bearded head, and displaying an erect phallus, but otherwise aniconic – had been vandalised during the night: their faces had been cut about, and their phalluses may also have been damaged ...”

“... highlighted by the radical changes currently being made to the legal aid system, that the process may be accelerating into a critical and damaging phase. To its credit, Oxford has managed to get one of the most sophisticated British scholars of modern public law to produce a brief and readable account of the interpenetration of these two constitutional ...”

“... final whistle blows it is possible for everyone to discover they have lost. On the morning of 7 May it was hard for any of the party leaders to avoid feeling that they had received the cold shoulder. There was a delightful, unnerving symmetry about it; each side had received just enough votes and seats to let them have a sniff of power, but not enough votes ...”

“... noted, Pyongyang’s diplomats have played a strikingly weak hand with remarkable skill. It may be the country that nobody loves, but it has confounded the predictions of its enemies. Perhaps the first thing we should know about North Korea is that much of what we think we know is wrong, and the rest, at best, is incomplete. North Korea, as Bruce ...”

“... The researchers are usually on-site for no more than an hour or two a day. Contract researchers may not do much intellectual work, but this doesn’t mean they are not well paid. A part-time contract researcher conducting four or five clinical trials a year can earn an average of $300,000 in extra income. In 2000, a full-time clinical trial site earned an ...”

“... in Iraq and 2487 in Syria. But the campaign has demonstrably failed to contain IS, which in May captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria. There have been far fewer attacks against the Syrian branch of al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the extreme Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham, which between them dominate the insurgency in northern Syria. The US failure ...”

“... Bugg, a teenager with dead eyes, rudimentary chords and an unexpected UK number one album, who may be the closest thing we have to a homegrown dust-bowl troubadour: he’s from the east Midlands. (Typical lyrics: ‘I go back to Clifton to see my old friends/The best people I could ever have met/Skin up a fat one, hide from the Feds.’) And at the other ...”

“... we prefer: what is surprising is that we could ever believe in prejudice-free inquiry. We may call the science we like good science, but scientific methods and scientific findings can’t easily disentangle themselves from the various uses to which they may be put – think of the harm scientific research has done ...”