“... agreed without a fight. ‘Next I tried to convince Gorbachev to abandon the idea of combining the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party with President of the Soviet Union.’ Gorbachev ‘did not reject my proposal out of hand. He even sought my advice: Perhaps I ought to run for president in Soviet Union-wide elections?’ What we see here is ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... there can’t have been very much anger because the novel wasn’t banned, or even expurgated. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post praised Mo Yan for having ‘spoken out courageously for freedom and individualism’. Here was a liberal voice in repressive China. ‘The Swedish Academy, which leaps at any chance to ...”

“... you might get a vast informational department store like the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times, but the great cities in between had their equivalents, from the Chicago Tribune to the Arizona Republic. If you were British, you might buy one of this country’s bitterly competitive national counterparts, such as the Telegraph, Times or ...”

“... recent claims is that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final in Lusail. Football, as Jonathan Wilson has done as much as any football writer to demonstrate, matters in multiple dimensions, but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who don’t otherwise watch much football. Observing its rites and rituals sustains the ...”

“... mercenaries, available to oppose China’s army of 2.5 million, or by a onesided treaty which no post-Qing Chinese government has ever recognised. The economies of China and Hong Kong were even then closely entwined (as those of China and Taiwan have never been). British pomp and circumstance camouflaged a simple truth: Hong Kong was there by Chinese ...”

“... overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such naturalised categories as ‘male’ versus ...”

“... manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such ...”

“... own terms. Most of his income has been re-invested in technical equipment so that he can work on post-production in what is effectively his own personal facility house. He still averages a ruminative new feature every three or four years, while devoting the bulk of his energy to the massive eight-part video epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a protracted ...”

“... announced in 1979 that ‘Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of post-industrial society than any other country.’ The Japanese themselves, he told them, had been too modest about their achievements. It was time they realised that in the overall effectiveness of their institutions, they were ‘indisputably number ...”

“... such challenges and responses. London’s experience is not unique. A few years ago the Washington Post reported problems, recognisable to Londoners, which were affecting the Washington Metro:When the Metro was built moving staircases got preference over regular staircases because, engineers figured, they would transport passengers to and from trains more ...”

“... of religious consensus: the immanence of God, the efficacy of prayer, Christ’s divinity, the post-mortem survival of souls, the dichotomy of heaven and hell. But the more pre-modern people examined these concepts, the more they disagreed. Theologians disputed the meaning of ‘witch’, for instance – just one of many points of interpretative doubt in ...”

“... decided not to oppose the Tories on the basic tenets of their austerity policies: she knew that a post-2015 Labour government would have done the same. The Labour Party that lost the election was conformist and visionless: it had forgotten what it meant to mount an opposition. The new system for Labour leadership elections that Miliband introduced in 2014 was ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... church at home is not healed by fixing its gaze on distant shores and the residual politics of post-imperial times ... England stands at a disadvantage as compared with other components of the United Kingdom – with Scotland, Wales, even Ulster, though this is a more dubious case. I prefer England to the late Empire and I should like it to ...”