“... lunchtime when the IRA used an outsider to deliver explosives to a fish shop on the Shankill. Thomas Begley, who blew up 11 people including himself, had seldom ventured from his Nationalist neighbourhood in his 23 years. And he probably wouldn’t have got as far as he did if he hadn’t been smocked and gloved to look like someone who was in his element ...”

“... of the respect which was paid to the priest’. The longings of a Numa manqué were only part of a more disturbing fantasy, for a murderous ethnic tribalism stalked the groves of Ferguson’s beloved antiquity. Ferguson’s vision of communal solidarity anticipates aspects of Etzioni’s apocalyptic nightmare. Etzioni is troubled by the cheapness of life in an ...”

“... from the hold; 15 men of the frigate Blanche died of rum on the coast of France, leaving their more fortunate mates to be locked up for seven years, until Napoleon’s fall. There were worse forms of captivity than internment. Sailors of the 44-gun Resistance, lost off Sumatra, were seized by pirates and sold as slaves to a sultan, fetching various sums in ...”

“... intellectuals for his father’s return turned the ambivalence Klaus had always felt towards Thomas Mann into alienation. When Klaus committed suicide in Cannes in May 1949, it was left to his sister Erika to spell out the meaning of the Suicide Club described in his unfinished novel. She told American audiences that the deaths of Virginia Woolf, Stefan ...”

“... I remember thinking that the official US response was rather subdued. What if the victim had been Thomas Friedman of the New York Times? Would Pervez Musharraf have been able to describe Friedman at a Washington press conference as ‘too intrusive’, which is what he said about Pearl? It was as if Pearl had connived in his own murder. The brother of ...”

“... cap on campaign donations, ID requirements that suppress African-American and student votes, and more than $4 billion in tax cuts. All of them disparaged Hillary Clinton but avoided mentioning Trump by name. Most of the crowd was docile, happy to be served a lunch of pulled-pork sandwiches and crisps, but a vocal minority was incensed at Trump’s ...”

“... have authority. To claim to be a Master is to claim to possess authority. We can be confident that more persons claim to have authority than do truly have it. What is less easy to determine is who in fact does possess it. The place of authority in human life is both centrally important and irretrievably contentious. The personnel of the ‘Modern ...”

“... England, America and Europe from the mid-1840s until her death in 1861. Late in life, she charged more for one of her ‘lectures’ than Charles Dickens could command for his readings, and her doings would be reported in the same paragraph as news of Queen Victoria. Her fame was huge and preposterous. In an age before the moving image, she turned herself ...”

“... to preface the letters with a short history of their family, recollection soon faltered. Little more than a year separated the two oldest James children, but as far as Henry could remember, William had been ‘always round the corner and out of sight’ – so in ‘advance’ of his younger and slower sibling ‘that I never for all the time of childhood ...”

“... Even on fairly modest assumptions about the length of election campaigns, that means that more than a year of his life must have been spent electioneering. He was elected to Parliament at 27, and sat in the House of Commons for more than twenty-eight years, before becoming President of the European Commission. He ...”

“... new man, who is present even in your ancient society, us you have to thank for the fact that he is more alive, more subtle and more gifted, than his pompous ancestors, for this child of the new age was delivered in the maternity hospital called Russia.’ There is a good deal of truth and ...”

“... is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no children’s book would ...”

“... though less successful attempt to theorise about material that had scarcely yet been explored. More empirical work is needed before theory can advance, and John Springhall’s Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1940 (1977) offered one way forward: the systematic study of organisations designed for children. This approach has the ...”

“... Or are we better advised, as Conor Gearty advised us (LRB, 16 November 1995), not to give more power to ‘unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable judges’ by weaving the European Human Rights Convention into the fabric of British law, but instead to reform Parliament and the electoral system, and devolve power away from the already ...”

“... concept of the ideal society or Utopia. I need not remind you that the discoverer of Utopia in Thomas More’s book was supposed to have been a Portuguese by birth who had sailed with Amerigo Vespucci to New Castile, but stayed behind when Vespucci returned, to explore the New World further. Equally, and perhaps ...”