“... It lost on all counts (this was the year of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor), as if held back by its own modesty. But go back to the film and you will find the astonishing Blitz sequence, which reproduces Boorman’s own boyhood wonder at the lightshow spectacular of the bombing raids – no matter the damage they did. In that rapturous ...”

“... Reich while Nazi rule rested on an element of consent from business, civil service and army. That held true even under the radicalising impact of war. The account here of an army that resisted the Commissar Order (to murder political commissars captured on the Eastern Front) and was not directly implicated in the work of murder squads of the Einsatzgruppen is ...”

“... years after finishing The Civilising Process, Elias’s professional life was fitful. He held a research fellowship at the LSE, moved to Cambridge with the rest of its staff during the war, and was later briefly interned as an alien on the Isle of Man (C.P. Snow helped to get him released). After the war he taught extra-mural classes in London, then ...”

“... all helped to bring Hitler to power in 1933. So did his own shrewdness as an organisation man who held the movement together in the lean years, then fended off the putschist hotheads. But the Hitler familiar from the newsreels, the demagogue, was decisively important. An embodiment of his Party’s dynamic appeal who came to be widely seen as a saviour, he ...”

“... and its allies gained only 140 seats, despite topping the first-round poll. The rump centre right held on to its fifty seats. The ‘clarification’ called for by the president has instead produced unprecedented confusion, with no discernible majority or significant plurality.In the short run, the only certainty is instability. Any minority, coalition or ...”

“... at a discount of 50 per cent. Coming under fire at a meeting of the Independent Publishers Guild, David Kneale, the managing director of Waterstone’s, reminded delegates that ‘we have shareholders and have to make a profit.’ He changed tack later, insisting that his first responsibility was to his staff (that wouldn’t include Robert Topping, of ...”

“... gone wrong, renewed, consummated, young, forbidden, discovered, doomed, forgotten, repressed. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is the latest literary bestseller to hit the US (and, remarkably, the UK). Its surprising success owes much to the strength of its narrative, and something to the dynamics of contemporary bookselling and the vogue of the ...”

“... feeling inside the House of Commons that it was failing the country. In 1830 there was a widely held conviction that government without more popular legitimacy would lack the strength, confidence and expertise to manage a turbulent, complex and increasingly urban society. In 1865 and again in 1880 most Liberals could not tolerate the idea of governing with ...”

“... core which has increased in relevance with the passage of time. Such, at any rate, is the theme of David Reisman’s two volumes of intellectual biography and analysis – the most careful and thought-provoking exegesis yet to appear. Crosland was a man of contradictions, as Reisman shows, a hedonist who was also a puritan, and so on. Perhaps the biggest ...”

“... On​ 17 September thousands of pagers held by members of Hizbullah across Lebanon and Syria exploded over the course of an hour, killing twelve people and injuring more than two thousand. The next day hundreds of walkie-talkies exploded, killing at least 25 people and injuring 750. These operations, designed to catch the world’s attention, were the latest example of the deployment by Israel’s military and intelligence services of spectacular high-tech methods ...”

“... has a telos: the fulfilment of the prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the House of David. This precludes the pyrotechnic genealogical loops of the pagan gods, but it also illustrates the problem of genealogy more generally. Where to start and who to include? The Gospel of Luke takes the lineal patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all ...”

“... happen – beyond the tweets, so much in Trumpworld never actually happened – you would never be held to account.’ Since Giuliani’s legal proceedings were so laughably unlikely to succeed, Republicans could safely support them. One hare-brained scheme was to get Texas to sue Pennsylvania for its conduct of the election, a case that was unanimously and ...”

“... force to what he uttered, by expressive movements of his hands, Johnson fairly seized them and held them down.’ But in restraining someone else’s gestures, he himself gestured; he gave additional force to his opinion by expressive movements of his hands. Gesture is unavoidable, because the body is seldom completely at rest, and almost any of its ...”

“... art through the state rather than at the gate is one of those political issues which is frequently held up as an unambiguous benchmark against which other less clear-cut positions can be measured, an unequivocal means of sorting out the interventionists from the free-marketeers. It is nothing of the sort. Nothing about arts funding is unambiguous or ...”

“... Diyarbakir as a student in 1967, when the walls were still visible on every side. In those days it held 100,000 inhabitants, of whom only a small minority lived in the new apartment blocks outside the old city. Visitors were rare: the whole eastern region of Anatolia had been closed to foreigners for the preceding three decades. Today the atmosphere in the ...”