“... recordings are programmed to call consumers and question them about their buying habits. These may not get so high a response rate as real living callers: but neither are their feelings hurt when the householder hangs up on them. Time discipline, then, has given us wealth, but as Young warns us, it has also caged us and driven us to the brink, and to ...”

“... that we still celebrate today (Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s Day, Shrove Tuesday, Easter, May Day, Guy Fawkes and some others) can be traced back to a specific moment in British history, and that few, if any, are connected with the surviving remnants of ancient or pre-Christian Britain. Ignoring the religious content of the Christian overlay, this ...”

“... probably a result of previous underreporting – and the Mayor of Beijing had been sacked. This may well have been the first time since the Revolution that anyone really senior had lost their job for incompetence, rather than because of political in-fighting. Everybody on the train back to the North-East had their home address and phone number taken by the ...”

“... and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and cinematographers were the last Caravaggisti; it is Caravaggio light that first picks out Harry Lime’s ...”

“... said it was a rationale for getting jobs for your friends and excluding your enemies. True as this may be of our present regime, it was unfair to him and had been put to him under torture, which he sympathetically said he could not bear. But sympathy here may not be our last emotion: Savonarola turned out to be a ...”

“... Anonymous city, handheld camera, actors who scarcely seem to be acting: we may think we know where we are, more or less. This is surely the New Wave by way of Neo-Realism, early Truffaut chasing late Rossellini. Didn’t we get over this? How could a film in this vein, namely L’Enfant, written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? To say nothing of the same prize won by their film Rosetta, a venture in just the same vein, in 1999 ...”

“... evoking the uncanny. And the uncanny is everywhere: in the actor/actress in a Kafka adaptation who may provide a link between Trumilcik, Jackson and Carol; in the sudden attraction to Miller that the college attorney seems to develop; in the calls to a battered women’s shelter someone appears to be making from Miller’s office at night; in Miller’s ...”

“... an autumn ballot, by which time Britain might even be out of recession. Westminster gossip about a May election seems optimistic. Much turns on whether the Conservative Party leadership really believes that it can, somehow, win the next election. Despite its polling death spiral, many at the top of the party believe affection for Labour is lukewarm. The ...”

“... Artistic influence​ may benefit from a degree of misunderstanding: it keeps it from lapsing into imitation. By the time William Morris launched the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s, it took a certain wilful ignorance to believe, as he and Ruskin did, that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals were anonymous artisans, working humbly for the glory of God ...”

“... I?Uruk rebels agin yir Muin      – nae way!Uruk maun be dinged doon      by the Heich God!May it be jeedged,      let Enlil jeedge it noo!May its cryin bairns      nae be soothered by their mithers!O Leddy, the hairp o murnin’s      in the dirt.Yir bait o murnin’s steekit      on furrin strands.Noo ...”

“... an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s correspondence with this little cabal breathes with that abject eagerness that was so much a part of the one-time Anglo-American ‘special ...”

“... us? – orange juice as we cast off, fudge as we meet the ocean funnelling into the inlet of Cape May, then boiled chestnuts, grey and wrinkled as the seas our stomachs ride (the heaving field of Delaware Bay) all morning, and for lunch a chocolate kiss and an apple from the pollen of two trees sensibly rooted, restaurants of bees ... What can our helpless ...”

“... closed These two sweet pages you were crushed between? Here is a green bus-ticket for one week In May, my place-mark in ‘The Dill Pickle’. I did not come home that Friday. I flick Through all our years, my love; and I love you still. These stories must have been inside my head That day, falling in love, preparing this Good life; and this, this ...”

“... towered stand Are the famed brandy of the damned And Wunderkinder who begin With champagne lights may end in gin. A drink, lest I forget thee, Zion. Which human host can match the Devil? God’s watery water is no use – The anthropologists’ excuse States every known society Makes alcohol and poetry Which in their likenesses explore Creation’s toxic ...”

“... of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, writes that ‘Iraqis may be deeply divided along sectarian, ethnic, tribal and factional lines,’ but they nevertheless ‘have a national consciousness, a great deal of national pride, and they do not want to be “occupied” or have a US presence any longer than ...”