“... by him did, arguing that the Ottoman state was strengthened by scriptural injunctions to wage holy war and by prohibitions on wine, which made for more disciplined armies.An alternative explanation for Ottoman ascendance was their alleged use of coercion, the characteristic that led the empire increasingly to be classified as a ‘despotism’. This ...”

“... Crucifixion may issue in resurrection, but is not annulled by it, any more than the horrors of class society are wiped clean by socialism. It’s hard to raise epochal issues in a study containing essays as fine-grained as the ones here. It’s a cliché of tragic theory, for example, that tragic art flourishes most profusely in periods of historical ...”

“... took me the best part of a locked-down month to get through Symbolic Forms – it is longer than War and Peace – and while I was constantly impressed by Cassirer’s scope, lucidity and command of detail, I felt starved of brilliance, insight and rigour. It was disappointing to find that Cassirer makes no attempt to explain why his three grand categories ...”

“... mean better quality control and a higher chance of delivery. Even (or especially) now, the brand war is fierce: on the black market, one can of Coca Cola will get you three cabbages, or five eggs, or five rolls of toilet paper, or two AA batteries, while a Pepsi will get you nothing.Residents of compounds without resources and purchasing power have to rely ...”

“... of expertise, all the while keeping in mind the median voter, with his or her everyday middle-class concerns about economic security. By contrast, come November this year, Farage, Johnson and their allies may well have achieved a far greater disruption of the political and economic status quo than Thatcher or Blair ever managed, with a smaller popular ...”

“... called Eric ‘might not unfairly be described as starting life with a handicap’. The Great War showed what handicapped Erics were made of; in 1918 my cousin Eric, up from Biggin Hill in a two-seater fighter, overhauled – little by little – a homing Gotha bomber and contributed to its destruction. It is unlikely that more recent Erics ...”

“... richly deserving it. His book focuses almost exclusively on dominant white males. Scottish working-class emigrants and soldiers only occasionally get a look in; and the single Scottish woman to receive cameo treatment, the missionary Mary Slessor, is gratuitously and in defiance of her photograph described as ‘plain’. As for those non-whites on the ...”

“... add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal ...”

“... was for the miners’ own good, and a testy note about Saddam’s hanging, though nothing on the war. With formidable realism, Desmond is shown to be far more exercised by ‘art-bollocks’, ‘creeping Christmas’, mobile phones, target-driven education, holiday camps, foreign films, Viagra spam – a bumper edition of Grumpy Old Men, in other words. But ...”

“... another, yet the ‘journey’ aspect is given hardly any significance; instinct tells us not to class it as a ‘travel book’. By contrast, in the case of Goethe’s Italian Journey, it is the journey itself, which is by no means altogether planned and develops rather like a work of art, that counts most. One could even, metaphorically, call it an ...”

“... insects to be studied under glass’. He did not address ‘social injustice, violence or war under capitalism’. Goffman’s actors were men and women in grey flannel suits who did not resist, ‘they conformed to the requirements of a local and global capitalism that erased class, race and gender in the name of a ...”

“... world. On balance, this aspect of the story struck me as not very plausible, what with the Cold War having ended some time back. The Russian spy is, however, of some interest in his own right. Like the chap in Gilbert and Sullivan, he’s an inadvertent source of merriment. Lloyd’s dialogue rarely strikes the ear as convincing. (‘Your theory of ...”

“... rebellion – or rather ensemble of rebellions – took the form of ‘petite guerre’, a phoney war of localised raids and skirmishes, rather than major confrontations. The outcome was decided in two near simultaneous battles in mid-November 1715, at Sherrifmuir near Stirling and at Preston. If the former was inconclusive, though marked by massive Jacobite ...”

“... a political consensus on taxation and welfare reform, British parties have lost their policy (and class) distinctiveness and become more like the electoral machines of their leaders, as is largely the case in America. Tony Blair’s celebrated ‘project’, guided by Philip Gould, dismantled the rambling institutions that formed the Labour coalition and ...”

“... Like Farocki, Steyerl is fascinated by the increased automation not only of labour and war but also of seeing and imaging, and by the subjectless operations of information processing. Along with Paglen and Weizman, she bears down on the control by corporations and governments, through satellite imaging and information mining, of what is given to us ...”