“... as terrorism, holy war, human rights and the status of women. In his entry on Terrorism, Augustus Richard Norton argues that the ‘deliberate and random uses of violence for political ends against protected (i.e. non-combatant) groups’ has historic roots in the Middle East, but is far from being exclusive to one confession. He maintains that the first ...”

“... whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, a Briton like Richard Hoggart, reared within a working-class milieu which seemed to be wall-to-wall. Hall was pitched between conceptual systems as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single doctrinal system, as heterodox in theory as he was hybrid in ...”

“... be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would arrive not in a chariot drawn by rams – as specified by the composer – but in a collapsible car. ‘What can I say?’ Haitink sighs, and the show goes ahead. What he made of the obscenely ...”

“... as long as I did not feel my conscience quite at rest’. The famous opening of Fingal’s Cave may have been jotted down when Mendelssohn visited the place, but it took years of tweaking before the score was given to the world, and the same is true of the fabulously fluent Fair Melusine Overture, the volatile (posthumously ...”

“... a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland Penrose’s words, paid particular attention to ‘what was ...”

“... in’ or ‘taking out’, as porous or trussed, open or closed, is not clear, but that may be the point: like the two states that underlie them, these two strategies are bound up with each other. In this light his collecting was another way of being porous to the world, and his being porous another way to defend against images and objects – that ...”

“... and the university; about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed ...”

“... writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career . . . Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: The bone loss and destruction in ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... and Ohio primary results made clear that this book has at least a hundred pages yet to go. This may not seem a very grown-up way of following an election, but it’s been forced on us by the apparent shortage of serious policy differences between the two remaining candidates. The questions of whether or not the future president should meet with Mahmoud ...”

“... and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too.The ebb and flow of water was essential to medieval understandings of time. As ...”

“... are not meant to be understood, you understand./They are only meant to terrify & comfort.’ Rilke may have been a ‘jerk’, but Berryman is here channelling the opening lines of the first Duino elegy and the terrifying angel that ‘serenely disdains/to annihilate us’. The comfort lies merely in not being annihilated.Berryman’s first Dream Song was ...”

“... foreign immigrants recently started drying up too, and those megapolises are now shrinking. London may be about to go the same way.I first arrived in St Albans one fine afternoon in late September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a ...”

“... But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8.5 billion by 2025, we must think of the outnumbering dead as outnumbered – at least until population slows (at perhaps ten ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”