“... If you can swallow your embarrassment, there is much to enjoy in the way he turns up every dial to max and then turns it up a little bit more, assisted by Chris O’Donnell as a surprisingly effective straight guy. To me, Heat is a stranger case. Pacino puts in a bizarrely strident and overblown performance as the cop to Robert de Niro’s robber. De Niro is ...”

“... and Gossaert has painted his own name below it (and again on the neck ornament of Balthazar’s black servant). On the right, Melchior is waiting with his presentation, rather precariously balanced in his limp hand. The detail is such that one can distinguish the hairs on the mole on Caspar’s cheek. Above the scene, and in another order of things, the ...”

“... Bridget has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her ...”

“... Despite this, a militant cast of mind has flourished in media and government circles. In Max Weber’s typology, the sect has become a church – at home with wealth and power and governed by Church Fathers who learned geopolitical casuistry as directors of US intelligence agencies, the neoconservatives’ institutional home.In retrospect, this coup ...”

“... known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle ...”

“... his ankle, just visible under the hem of his trousers, and saw it had been replaced by a slender black rod. We were both heading for the same rehabilitation centre. I guessed it was Nabokov. In January he’d been coming to the end of his first year of service in the army’s 58th Brigade when he stepped on a mine. He was with a group assigned to pick up ...”

“... Politics,​ Max Weber wrote, is a ‘slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment’. The maxim, from his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, is now usually deployed to chide a left impatient for social transformation, but Weber’s account of political leadership deserves more than this ...”

“... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...”

“... cello.’ Kate Kennedy was in the audience. The cello, lost for more than eighty years in the black hole of the Holocaust, was there because of her book.When she was fifteen, Kennedy won a cello scholarship to Wells Cathedral School and began to practise with the intensity and single-mindedness of an elite athlete preparing for competition. But a year ...”

“... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...”

“... the jurisdiction of the state from which the first mid-level culprit to be caught, the doleiro (black market money-changer) Alberto Youssef, hailed: the atypically middle-class provincial society of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. Moro, a native son who had cut his teeth as an assistant in the mensalão trial, was the presiding judge in its capital ...”

“... The difference is very clear if we compare him with the great theorist of modern polytheism, Max Weber. In Weber, the gods that have risen from their graves in a disenchanted world are truly warring – there is no common standard of value, no conceivable truce, among them, any more than in the world of the great powers. The hope of a eudaimonist ...”

“... SNP’s open-door citizenship policy which would, for example, allow the illegitimate offspring of black American GIs stationed in Scotland to be as Scottish as ... well, Sir Nicholas himself. Vote Tory to preserve the Scot-Brit race. This eccentric addendum to the Unionist creed was not openly endorsed by Fairbairn’s successor as Tory candidate, a generally ...”

“... political fringes in the West, refused to believe the rape allegations. The Grayzone journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté tweeted about ‘fabricated atrocity tales’ and accused the Patten report of ‘laundering’ the ‘Hamas mass rape hoax’. Their denialism galvanised Israel’s defenders. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said that he ...”

“... carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age has, however, made it clear that the tomorrow in question is yesterday’s ...”