“... protocols and internal military guidelines give much latitude to commanders on the ground. This may make the law appear feeble, sometimes to the point of vacuity, but it is also its realism. Chief among the paradoxes of the law of war is that it cannot be enforced. The moral opprobrium that has surrounded the use of poison gas is an exception that proves ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... of Di Benedetto’s style; not so easy to live with what that style chooses to show us. David Pérez Vega, in a blog of 2011, finds in The Silencer a phrase that ‘appears to be a synthesis of Di Benedetto’s reflections on existence’: ‘How can they ignore the essential fact, that error is incorporated into the very roots of humankind?’ For ...”

“... in exile had attracted the attention of many non-professionals, most strikingly in the novels of David Malouf (An Imaginary Life, 1978) and Christoph Ransmayr (The Last World, 1988). Interest in exile as a subject has reinforced the relentless expansion of modern scholarship into former niche areas, and Ovid’s exile poetry has now become one of Latin’s ...”

“... opening passage. ‘A Vietnamese tourist!’ Mankell writes. ‘In Sweden in 1965! That may have happened once, at most.’ In Mankell’s books, the symbolic outsider is more likely to be from Africa or the former Soviet bloc, and the contrast is heightened by his predominantly rural settings. But Wallander and Martin Beck exist in a similar world ...”

“... small attacks, but the local population was, Ludewig suggests, mostly quiet – an attitude that may well have been prompted by the massacre of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane by Waffen-SS soldiers a few weeks before. Model, on the other hand, had to watch German forces squeeze along the few remaining roads near Falaise, abandoning most of their equipment ...”

“... or two feeble excuses for his hostility to the study of post-Chaucerian English at Oxford. Lord David Cecil’s ‘gentlemanly and rather old-fashioned scholarship’ is duly noted, but ‘this is not to disparage Lord David’s accomplishments, either as critic or biographer.’ Why not? Even Empson’s expulsion from ...”

“... difference. On her deathbed, she bequeathed her letters to the British Museum, ‘that the world may know he loved me once’. There’s an element of revenge in Nayder’s treatment of Dickens. ‘This book forces him to the margins,’ she says. The problem is that Catherine is such an unwilling ally in her project. After her marriage, she seems to have ...”

“... have suspected it, but in Lloyd George’s lifetime it was never publicly exposed. Margaret and David Lloyd George continued to share houses, holidays, family cares and political duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded ...”

“... In May 2001, the French National Assembly passed a law, the Loi Taubira (named after Christiane Taubira, the Socialist deputy who sponsored the bill), recognising the Atlantic slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’. France is, as a result, the only country in the world that has condemned slavery in the name of human rights ...”

“... witnesses. A local curate called them ‘poor needy fellows of small or noe credit & such as … may be easily drawne to depose an untruth’. Tanner, meanwhile, was recast as a man who ‘well performed his worke with care’ and ‘such a one as is to be beleved upon his oath’. Alexandra Shepard has created a historical framework to help us grasp the ...”

“... with diagrams of blocks needed for an architectural project. Others were on pieces of paper which may have been preserved because they also contained notes, fragments of poems or drafts of letters, for example. Such drawings can be seen in New York, together with an outstanding selection of the small group of highly finished sheets that he made as gifts for a ...”

“... list, who claims that he in fact owns the boat. The Italian media have suggested that Khudainatov may technically also be the owner of the 140-metre, $700 million Scheherazade, impounded in May 2022 by port authorities in Tuscany. Scheherazade is also sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s boat’, or (according to the ...”

“... earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come ...”