“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

“... for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the window of the ...”

“... from the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. ‘Frustrating though this may be,’ Porter argues, ‘confusion and complexity are generally a truer way of looking at things than certainty and simplicity.’ He proposes as a fanciful discipline that ‘we imperial historians agree to a moratorium on the “e”, “i”, and ...”

“... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...”

“... but no president of Palestine. ‘A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,’ David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, ‘and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.’ This ‘new language’ was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official ...”

“... the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... to the flexibilities of our belief in them. But novelists do write to a present, and though there may be nothing of fishwives or moneylenders or hip hop in their pages, the language, the texture, the pattern, the ‘aesthetics’, have everything to do with the social pressure under which the book was written and under which it was initially read. Stendhal is ...”

“... a shortcoming emphasised by Girvin. Exasperated, the US representative in Dublin, David Gray, complained that ‘this running a government on hatred for another country is a very dangerous thing and is bound to land him [de Valera] on the scrap heap eventually.’ He couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Emergency’ was also a technical ...”

“... At another point, Campbell notes that ‘he had clearly been chatting to his maker again.’ That may be the key to Blair’s metamorphosis from a politician who prided himself on his sensitivity to public opinion, to one who prided himself on his ability to ignore it. The full extent of the disaster in Iraq is not present in these pages, but it looms over ...”

“... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...”

“... imperatives became acute.’ And each claimed that while the development of the market economy may have appeared natural and inevitable, it was in fact contingent on political circumstances. Early on Rogan identifies a crucial parallel: Tawney, Polanyi and Thompson all experienced an epiphany when they moved out of their comfortable intellectual milieux ...”

“... and its immobilisation in infrastructure – a ‘spatial fix’, in the words of the geographer David Harvey – is one progenitor of Xi’s grand initiative. China’s treatment by the US is another.In October 2011, Obama’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of ‘America’s Pacific Century’ in an article for Foreign ...”

“... feelings in their faces.’ Hitchcock’s films are informed by the sense that pleasant faces may conceal murderous feelings. Respectable appearances repeatedly dissolve into extraordinary menace. Benign professors whip out guns, as do nuns and housekeepers. Being afraid that friendly looks might fade to an ominous black stare isn’t, of course, an ...”

“... comics and the like could be made to serve some of the goals set for high art from Rembrandt and David to Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement ...”