“... introduction to NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-60.* The political ideology of Neorealism may have been diffuse, in some ways Catholic and in others communist, but its mission was focused. The aim was to give a presence to those who had been invisible and a voice to the voiceless: the poor, the dispossessed, the unemployed, peasants, children and ...”

“... to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.Stack and ...”

“... with the infirmities of old age.’ She is indeed ready to die, and it is a difficulty that Justin may feel that he has to do the same. In the Sudan she declares: ‘My time is up.’ She is infatuated with a handsome police chief, goes rather grimly to bed with him in the time he can spare from gambling sessions, and then kills herself. Justin goes back to ...”

“... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms ...”

“... known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the first heads of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate ‘core’ of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its ...”

“... Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan culture for ‘however long this country has … been in existence’. Many Afghans dispute this, saying that corruption was manageable under the ...”

“... he had used when publishing his earliest poems: Incertus. How far back this mindset went we may never know, because, if Reid is correct, Heaney’s childhood letters have been lost. It is already visible in the opening letter of this selection, written to his schoolfriend Seamus Deane in December 1964, when they were in their mid-twenties. ‘Christmas ...”

“... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...”

“... 34 seasons, were dedicated to the subject. Buckley argued on air that however kindly Ho Chi Minh may have seemed in the 1940s, the sheer number of Vietnamese people seeking refuge from repression south of the 17th parallel surely justified US intervention on humanitarian as well as anti-communist grounds (this argument proved influential on the human rights ...”

“... back of a truck talking to a girl as the sun goes down.’ His attachment to quiet epiphanies here may strike us as a little dated: but perhaps it shouldn’t, since these are hardly period-specific pleasures. And one wouldn’t want to line up with the point-scoring American film critics of today, reviled by Wenders in the Introduction as lacking ‘modesty ...”

“... an interpreter to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His ...”

“... the footstool and candelabra in the unfinished portrait of Madame Récamier when he was a pupil in David’s studio). The objects represented here can be traced from old inventories; indeed, an academic study exists devoted solely to Ingres’s eloquent mantelpieces. He shows not the slightest hint of embarrassment about the material expression of power ...”

“... stay with all of us for the rest of our lives and indeed, at the present rate of attrition, it may be something that will only survive in the memory. The combined effect of incessant bombardment with the onset of a Balkan winter may snuff out everything I saw. On a paved street in the centre of town, near the Eternal ...”

“... sometime after 14 February 1479, when he dictated his will ‘lying ill in bed’, and before 11 May, when the will was opened and read. He would have been about fifty. In November that year, his widow, Giovanna Cuminella, married a Messinese notary. The San Cassiano altarpiece (1475-76). The Venetian evidence apart, these fragments give little insight ...”

“... be squared with democratic ideals of political and civic equality? Before the Jubilee the dilemma may have looked insoluble. One proposal was that the Queen should slum it a bit more, perhaps through a spot of biking – the so-called Dutch model of monarchy. Further possibilities for down-marketing readily suggest themselves: the monarch could do something ...”