“... Wall movement, which was itself echoed in Tiananmen. Both protests claimed descent from the May Fourth movement of 1919, when students rallied in Beijing against the humiliating terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The heroic spirit of May Fourth pulled in artists and intellectuals of many persuasions and was ...”

“... Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating the situation and the gravity of the threat. George Bush, November 1990 He tried [12 years ago] to develop a programme – an upgraded Oak Ridge [enrichment] facility in Iraq. Of course he couldn’t. It is too complex for Iraqi science or technology ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... descriptive dimensions altogether. In the Cubist works of 1911 or 1912, objects or even objecthood may still be denoted through tokens and fragments – the famous stencilled letters; the mustachios of The Poet; the moustaches, buttons and sleeve ends of Man with a Pipe – but they have been wholly overtaken by signification itself, by an ever freer play of ...”

“... in what context is it the case that any criticism of Israel will be taken to be anti-semitic? It may be that what Summers was effectively saying is that the only way a criticism of Israel can be heard is through a certain acoustic frame, such that the criticism, whether it is of the West Bank settlements, the closing of Birzeit and Bethlehem University, the ...”

“... senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi ...”

“... cases have had a different type, MM. There is evidence from other kinds of CJD that this variant may predispose people to develop TSEs. It may be, however, that the main effect of MM is only to shorten the incubation period. Estimates of the eventual size of the vCJD epidemic have to take this into account – are we all ...”

“... of abroad, he was reading Freud and writing short stories. The seeds of his science fiction may have been sown in wartime Shanghai, but they germinated in postwar England. His early adult life could almost be a blueprint for the struggling young writer of the mid-20th century: two years of reading medicine at Cambridge before dropping out and going to ...”

“... who wants to deliver a portrait of the whole life, inside and out – something the subject may have spent a lifetime scheming to avoid.Before this biography, the name ‘Brookner’ probably brought to mind a succession of solitary women pining for love while waiting for death, an image that critics were quick to attach to the author of these ...”

“... Back to health By a rich widow in Rome With the help Of a blind servant girl Whose soft steps I may have heard Entering and leaving My room at night And whose name I’d love to know And whisper in the dark. Terror   Saw a toad jump out of boiling water   Saw a chicken dance on a hot plate   in a penny arcade Saw Etruscans in a museum   flogging ...”

“... they have failed to return to their duties or contact their families, we begin to suspect that we may never see them again. Over the years, their angry little world has replaced itself many times, while only a few stock characters have stuck it out like the rest of us, no longer available for the more exciting plot-lines. We have learnt to live with the ...”

“... Light stretching my late summer shadow longover parched grass, low sun, this alive, thisevening. Light of mid-morning picking outall the trees’ capillaries, black against the lightof blue’s possibilities, would I rush outsideto see this, yes I would, this light? It’s so kind,it remembers me. Light of first thing, spilled skymixing day up, all the colours that go into day,you wouldn’t believe how many ...”

“... In Plac Litweski they play chess Under ignored monuments: Unknown Soldier, Union of Lublin, 3rd of May Constitution (1791). Factory chimneys like embedded freighters, The baroque and the industrial, Watch-towers and crematoria. They float now reminders of Majdanek, Suburb ringed with barbed-wire. In sudden gusts hands cling to hats As if levitating. A ...”

“... in explaining why torture or other such abuse is bad in principle. The felicific calculus may well favour lynching an innocent man, if a crazed mob is gagging for it: indeed, the utilitarian grounds for pandering to the crowd strengthen as its bloodlust grows more fierce. Nor does it get us very far to be told that torture is wrong, as some ...”

“... for the New American Century, Robert Kagan, one of the leading promoters of the Iraq war. We may never know what Obama thought Nuland was up to when she flew in to the Maidan to pass out cookies to the protesters in Russia’s backyard. But the message has got around by now that Obama doesn’t particularly want to know things. On Ukraine, he seemed far ...”