“... Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs ...”

“... that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These ...”

“... of this wish – that republican authority should once and for all supplant paternal authority – may now feel difficult to enter into. It should not therefore be dismissed as affectation. These moods run in fevers that acquire ingenuousness by being shared. A seductive cant of fellowship urged the project on its way, a style of conspicuous sincerity that ...”

“... of conflict has turned 90 degrees. Each new Israeli bombing campaign – in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and May 2021 – has pushed Palestinian resistance deeper underground, to extend and fortify its elaborate system of tunnels. The deaths of more than five thousand Palestinians and the damage or destruction of nearly a quarter of the buildings in the strip have come ...”

“... of the debates: ‘No props, notes, charts, diagrams or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by any candidate’; ‘The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions’; ‘Except as provided in subparagraph ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat ...”

“... its armies in the field, this necessarily meant that the Western Front must have priority. This may have been Asquith’s grand strategy, faute de mieux; it was likewise Lloyd George’s, faute de mieux. For Britain, the internal politics of the war therefore turned to a large extent on whether the generals or the politicians would call the shots. The ...”

“... of convictions. But if a preference for clarity and coherence is an indication of paranoia we may wonder whether there is a viable alternative now to paranoia as a way of life. Abstraction – ‘striving towards structure’ – is an unpromising cure for contingency. Trotter looks to the ‘representational strategies’ of the great literary Modernists ...”

“... or flagrantly unreliable evidence. Her end is predictably murky. Octavian, so the cynical say, may well have publicly paraded his disappointment at Cleopatra’s premature end, but surely he had enough guards and thugs at his disposal to have prevented her death had he really wanted to. You don’t need to go so far as to argue – and Chauveau does ...”

“... with those of Queens or the Bronx) and hence its unequal distribution of resources. Manhattan may well be the world’s great cultural centre, yet few of the artists and intellectuals whose work animates it can afford to live there, and Bender says little about the effects of that. New Yorkers in search of cultural innovation are more likely to find it in ...”

“... military have real power over policy-making, even in matters of war. General Tommy Franks may have regarded Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, as ‘the stupidest fucking guy on the planet’, but he took Feith’s orders, and those of the civilians standing behind him: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the president himself. Their ...”

“... on a map? No doubt financial constraints were the main cause of this information blackout, but it may also have seemed excusable because of our uncertainty about what sort of thing a translation of a poem is: how much, and what, we need to know in order to make sense of it. Translation necessarily cuts poems loose from their origins: it carries them not only ...”

“... if the staphylococcus gets into a bone it can be out of antibiotic reach and amputation may be the only remedy.The nature of the anti-staphylococcal immune response explains why there are no successful vaccines. Enthusiasm for them in the 1920s and 1930s was a result of the rhetorical skills of Alexander Fleming’s boss at St Mary’s Hospital, Sir ...”

“... person) as ‘indefinable … which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally’ – promoted in him ‘an almost irresistible inclination to visit different parts of his native country, in quest of knowledge or amusement’. At 26 he was not ready to pray away the rest of his life, to say nothing of ...”

“... were cordoned off in separate, inferior waiting rooms in bus terminals and train stations. On 4 May, a group of 18 activists, black and white, men and women, all members of CORE, ventured south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ‘Freedom Ride’, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly ...”