“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in ...”

“... racism of the type that depicted Africans as cartoon cannibals. Rehabilitation was slow. In 1986 David Eden argued in a psychoanalytical study that the cruelty was sadomasochism of an infantile, and therefore less than sinister, kind. Gilbert, like his characters, inhabited a pre-genital universe somewhere between fairyland and nightmare. Accusations of ...”

“... them from talking about ‘the moral landscape’, fMRI studies aren’t taken very seriously. As David Eagleman writes in his recent book Incognito, ‘imaging methods make use of highly processed blood-flow signals, which cover tens of cubic millimetres of brain tissue. In a single cubic millimetre of brain tissue, there are some one hundred million ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David Foster Wallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work is ‘strange and beautiful’, with ...”

“... hair [is] now greying … He’s wearin a broon cord jaykit … ruined by the Glasgow Rangers FC lapel badge, pinned next tae his Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers yin, and he fairly reeks ay Blue Stratos.’ The mockery and rejection of a pre-1980s Scottish masculinity based on manual work, drinking and hometown loyalty are central themes of both ...”

“... France, seems plausible. If these figures are accepted, it would make the battle less of a David and Goliath struggle than is popularly assumed. Curry also gives a good account of Agincourt’s after-life in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in myth, legend, literature and propaganda, and describes the attempts made by the French to explain away the strange ...”

“... may want to withdraw troops from Iraq but its leaders outdo each other in condemning Iran. General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has accused Iran of being behind the latest fighting in Baghdad and Basra. He admitted during his appearance before Congress on 8 April that any improvement in security is fragile. Over the last few months, Iraq has ...”

“... as well as the patriarch’s retinue of scientists and theologians, stood like a row of Caspar David Friedrich solitaries, facing the ice as if facing their judge. The Ilulissat ice fjord leads back to one of the world’s most powerful glaciers, the Sermeq Kujalleq. Its cliff-like face is three miles wide and, counting its hidden underwater bulk, nearly a ...”

“... to. In 1987, in the catalogue published to accompany an exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis referred to Larsen as ‘the mysterious and lovely Virgin Islander’. Eight years later, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis relayed the (unsourced) information that Larsen was looked down on by ‘some of her fellow Virgin Islanders’ for ...”

“... At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience: congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins ...”

“... unnostalgic approach of these texts to the Israelite people and to many of its leaders, including David, the founder of the national dynasty. It is unfortunate that Douglas should have chosen to engage in the same conjectural enterprise as such interpreters, for she is certainly more interesting intellectually than they are. In her discussion of the scapegoat ...”

“... Ali’s days are numbered. ‘One day, he will wake up and discover he’s out of business,’ David Lamm, chief of staff of US forces in Afghanistan, said in a press interview. But when I went to find Hazrat Ali, he was busy meeting US forces to plan election security. It is thanks to relationships like these that one can easily imagine the poppy economy ...”

“... military commanders have been as heavy-handed as Bremer and the CPA in Baghdad. In Mosul, General David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, has been far more careful not to alienate the Sunni establishment in the city, which was a main recruiting ground for the Iraqi army (there are 1100 generals in Mosul because Saddam often paid off ...”