“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”

“... and proceeded to turn it into ‘a brothel of shame’ and him into a nervous wreck. Whatever may have been Lukács’s need for self-punishment, expiation and redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair ...”

“... was a ‘land of liberty’, though liberty for whom and from what is less clear – freedom may well seem less tangible in a Sports Direct warehouse.Tory politicians have been keen to emphasise that their policy has strictly followed the science, rather than being dictated by any other concern; one of the justifications for the extraordinary powers ...”

“... kept her on the boards (against the advice of the majority of her critics) well into her fifties may be connected with a capacity to embarrass which often frays the edges of her writing.‘You can call me Colette’ isn’t a statement of the same order as ‘Call me Ishmael.’ The social limitations to experience in a woman’s life still preclude the ...”

“... in the West sees it as a cautionary tale.An effort to rehabilitate the memory of the war may therefore seem to have a certain romantic quality. A former CIA officer enlisted in the war effort, Paul Miller is one of the few US officials of that period who focused his career on Afghanistan. From the CIA he made his way to the staff of Douglas ...”

“... cassettes in his cab and plasters the interior with coloured stickers containing the name of God may be pious – but not strenuously so. Islam is part of his lifestyle, but not the key to his identity. Islam and Arabism merge imperceptibly into one another. Although the two may conflict at the intellectual and political ...”

“... law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology ‘may decide that those who today eliminate races’ – or classes – ‘are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed’, terror must ‘fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim’. The purpose of totalitarianism, in ...”

“... on the poem, is a French slang term for lesbian that gained currency in the 1920s and 1930s. It may have derived from the fashion for dressing up in male evening dress in beau monde lesbian circles during this period – tuxedo-wearers were often compared to pingouins. Bishop’s Penelope Gwin (or Pen Gwin) travels light, carrying with her only two ...”

“... of Karameh in Jordan, where he fought against Palestinian guerrillas under Arafat’s command. In May 1972, he was wounded in the shoulder by friendly fire during the rescue of the hijacked Sabena Flight 707. Bibi could have continued with a career in the army like Yoni, but he had more worldly ambitions. Two months after the Sabena rescue he returned to the ...”

“... Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often ...”

“... his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be left out to achieve such a grand synthesis, or so disquieting a compromise.He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer ...”

“... at the Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility ...”

“... he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most poets tend to be experts on themselves. Outgoing and unegoistic as he was, Keats shows himself in his letters to be endlessly articulate on himself and his writing, and the poems, too, can be read as ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”

“... might be, always modest. She might be ill, disturbed, mad even, but she still knew her place. It may be objected that madness did not come into it; that, as Mr Parr had said, this was depression and a very different thing. But though we clung to this assurance it was hard not to think her delusions mad and the tenacity with which she held to them, defended ...”