“... abscesses beneath the old skin, hopeless and incorrigible instincts which left to themselves will foster a world of predators and carrion. Such a world can never heal itself. Hence hope lies solely with larger-scale civilisation, whatever metropolitan tolerance is still available in North America, the United Kingdom or the new Europe. Humankind’s inherent ...”

“... embodiment of international law. 2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only foster anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely to multiply recruits for it. America will be more endangered after a war with Iraq than before it. 3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly declared to be ...”

“... scandals and even portrayed as ordering the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of ...”

“... and the exotic East. A separate gallery showcases the Oscar gowns and suits of stars from Jodie Foster and Samuel Jackson to Jakob Dylan against the background of a silent video loop of American Gigolo and other Armani-designed films. Sections devoted to elaborately beaded, exquisitely embroidered and sleekly tailored garments in black and ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... suitable,’ a rationale the judge deemed not credible. Her baby was taken from her and placed in foster care. On the birth of her fourth child, she again declined a residential placement, and the child was fostered until a final ruling determined all four children should be adopted. Although I didn’t understand her reasoning – wouldn’t you do anything ...”

“... House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... decided to double down on Garbo by pairing her with its most bankable male star, John Gilbert, in the costume drama Flesh and the Devil (1926). She plays a femme fatale who comes between two childhood friends by marrying one of them while in love with the other. Even in the more adventurous vamp and flapper films, sex was something you did ...”

“... of the danger he was running regarding the obscenity laws and obloquy in his own social circles. John Sturrock, whose translation this is, points out in his introduction how the First World War had helped lighten persecution and, in turn, gave breathing space to Proust’s quest, not for lost time, but for revealing human complexity. Proust had very mixed-up ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... newspapers we knew that Europe was the future; its parliament, if not exactly sexy, at least made John Major’s backbenchers foam at the mouth. And maybe Derrida’s trademarked ‘always already’, or Barthes’s writer who ‘can only imitate a gesture that is … never original’, spoke with more than usual force, in those end-of-historyish times, to ...”

“... sensibility, they’re caught in the crossfire of the intergenerational squabble that caused David Foster Wallace, speaking for ‘the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully’, to characterise the typical Updikean baby boomer as ‘an asshole’. Gates’s men are often assholes, no question, but in place ...”