“... line of upright exhaust pipes beside a verge of sand, scrub and trash. This, too, is undergoing a major overhaul, largely to cope with the volume of traffic, but security is being tightened as well. Mariposa is the preferred point of deportation for illegal migrants: truck drivers, unlike the crowds of tourists at the downtown crossing, are used to the sight ...”

“... a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground, apparently dead. When she revives, her father, Leonato, exclaims: Do not ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... crowds who breached the Berlin Wall less than three months later. All this occurred without any major loss of life, largely thanks to Gorbachev. In September 1990 came his culminating achievement, the Treaty of Moscow, which ended the four-power occupation of Germany that had been in effect since 1945, permitting its peaceful reunification in October. But ...”

“... do much for her claim to acute contemporaneity. Flaubert’s catalogue already includes such major and minor exercises in revisionism as the defence of slavery, the celebration of censorship and the denial of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (‘an old wives’ tale’). It includes the dictum: ‘Say about a great man: “He is completely ...”

“... delivered to Parliament on 23 November, confirmed that this is the ambition: none of Osborne’s major planned cuts was reversed, an overall budget surplus remains the goal (simply postponed from 2020 to 2025), planned public investment will be extremely modest and focused on infrastructure, while increased borrowing – of £122 billion – signals not some ...”

“... but not a place to turn for analysis. Lambasted by conservatives as hotbeds of liberalism, the major networks have bent over backwards to present the President as being ‘in charge’, making excuse after excuse for his indecision on the day of the attacks, and repeatedly telling the public that he had miraculously become a mature ...”

“... the way there, so it’s becoming really clear … One of the first things I did was declare it a major incident because I knew we were going to need a lot of help.’‘I just knew it was probably the job of our lives,’ Pat Goulbourne, another senior officer, said. ‘I could see fire from the lower floors and I couldn’t believe I was looking at fire all ...”

“... conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, has probably accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation ...”

“... he had rejoiced, which had left the country, with proportionately the highest losses of any of the major powers, incapable of competing in the same way a second time, without any ally to the east. None of this, of course, affects Bloch’s stature as a medievalist, which remains unsurpassed. No historian is omnicompetent. What Bloch achieved with his deep ...”

“... discernment. She and I tour the Ernest Blumenschein Home – Blumenschein being one of the major New Mexico painters of the 1920s and 1930s – and she finds his sickly greeny-yellowy paintings of adobe churches and Indian squaws as hideous as I do. Those wretched Fauves have a lot to answer for. We are in ecstasy together at the Museum of ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... Framing the matter like this isn’t to accept as proven the ‘impossibility theorem’ of John Bellamy Foster, according to which there can be no ecologically sound capitalism. Nor is it to take it for granted that the next mode of production (and pollution) will necessarily be greener than that of the Soviet bloc, where the USSR drained away the Aral ...”