“... other preoccupation is the widening rift in Europe – France especially – between citizens of North African descent and the rest. Todd holds the rest largely responsible for this polarisation and the dangers that attend it. His book is a brilliant piece of wishful thinking, in which the rediscovery of equality and the reconciliation of believers with ...”

“... metal or reinforced concrete frames. Demolitions of a slower kind are depicted in an exhibition of Paul Hester’s photographs of Houston, ‘The Elusive City’, shown at the Menil Collection, the serenely long and luminous museum by Renzo Piano which is one of Houston’s most treasured resources. Hester’s vision is rather at odds with it: he has a clever ...”

“... was clearly affronted by the sight of the Brazilians being frustrated by the scarlet-clad men of North Korea and so we got such gems as ‘and now Robinho’s sinuous swerve is blocked by yet another red robot.’ No one has asked Sir Terry what he thinks about the threatened strikes but it might be very entertaining if someone only would.26 June. South ...”

“... by the 19th century, when the French imaginaire was dominated by a Near East which included North Africa, and when the term croisade had long been at home in the French language (the English and German equivalents did not appear until the 18th century), the French saw the crusades as historically theirs, and French scholars dominated the ...”

“... my offer of a place at college, packed up my red rucksack, and took a National Express coach up north. It wasn’t enough that I was saved: I wanted to save other people. I had decided to become an evangelist. I went to work for an evangelical missionary organisation, one of whose many purposes and functions was to train young people to spread the good ...”

“... south through the Brenner Pass, the Allies hoped in vain that he would halt at a defensive line north of Rome, knowing that they lacked the strength to meet massed Wehrmacht ranks head on.As Allied troops learned to fight within their means, the rains set in, churning up the strade bianche, and the advance slowed. Men of the British 8th Army, used to racing ...”

“... towards the young Jewish state, but made its reservations plain. In an article published in 1958, Paul Ricoeur challenged the claims of André Neher, a fellow contributor to L’Esprit, that the accession of Jews to biblical lands anchored an ‘essence’ of Jewishness. ‘Is this essence you invoke,’ Ricoeur asked Neher, ‘which in your view founds your ...”

“... The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five miles through manufacturing and industrial towns and suburbs, places like Garfield, Lyndhurst, Kearny and Harrison, where it hooks east, then south ...”

“... customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of germ warfare, not a view I’d then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely ...”

“... these are the relevant facts: this rubbish heap of details is the past, the London under London. Paul Sayer works as a staff nurse in a psychiatric hospital. The Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior ...”

“... product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world. Popa was born in 1922 in an area north of Belgrade called Banat, where the population was a mixture of Serbs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians. His father was a record clerk and afterwards worked for a bank; his mother was a housewife. He went to school in the town of Vrsac, and in his ...”

“... time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... Spanish Earth but includes much film noir, while finding its ultimate expression in Citizen Kane. Paul Robeson isn’t the only headline performer: he is supported by Billie Holliday and even Duke Ellington. Indeed, Denning argues that because ‘Pop Frontism’ was less a particular worldview than a set of emotional responses, Elia Kazan can be seen as ...”

“... in Westminster Hall and claim it as his own. Richard’s empty throne stands at the heart of Paul Strohm’s fine study of the textual consequences of the Lancastrian usurpation. It is both a material presence, a space to be occupied and defended by the victorious Henry, and a permanent void, a metonym for the legitimacy that the early Lancastrian kings ...”

“... cosmos, an integral factor in a prolonged, and possibly insoluble, post-colonial schizophrenia? Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who ...”