“... The technical problems, Atran likes to think, are overwhelming. A remark by the US physicist Richard Garwin, worth bearing in mind in case this ever changes: ‘Although a country would not be destroyed by such an explosion, it could ruin itself by its reaction.’ More generally, Atran believes that sacred values are not convertible. When Jewish ...”

“... have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.Translators always ...”

“... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...”

“... and advising them to isolate themselves from their families. His real name turns out to be Miles Gary Sonkin. His life follows the recent history of American grifts: high probability selling, neurolinguistic programming, the Rajneesh movement. ‘We’d long started to feel that the War Room resembled a cult,’ Tahsin and Shea write, ‘and given that ...”

“... Eighties. Chief among the leaders of this mission are the Cambridge classicists Simon Goldhill and Richard Hunter, who has written a book on Apollonius (The ‘Argonautica’ of Apollonius: Literary Studies, 1993) as well as producing a scholarly edition of Book Three and a translation of the whole thing (which is already, ominously, out of print). This ought ...”

“... synonymous with (among other liberations) sexual liberation, and he behaved like Hugh Heffner or Richard Neville. His playboy aspect means he is dismissed as a lightweight by those who claim to know what is serious in Russia; but he gave a pungent and rousing speech. ‘The trouble we have in becoming popular,’ he said at one point, ‘is that a lot of ...”

“... 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.’ I heard him say: ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid ...”

“... defending the American colonists in their struggle not to be taxed by a Parliament three thousand miles away, not simply because there must be no taxation without representation and it would be absurd to send American MPs to Westminster, but also because the colonists had grown away from their mother country, grown too ‘Whiggish’ for their internal ...”

“... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...”

“... defenceless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.’ (Arkansas is six hundred miles from the Mexican border.) Ernst, who was rumoured to be on the vice-presidential shortlist, says that Obama has ‘become a dictator’ and should be impeached. She told an NRA convention that she’d take up her Smith & Wesson against the government ...”

“... finally on the wrong side. The discovery of ancient funerary urns in a Norfolk field, some thirty miles from Norwich, prompted the writing of Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658). Browne was intrigued by this local find, and his brief treatise on the subject is a mix of archaeological notes and antiquarian learning that blossoms into a reflection on last ...”

“... observed. The Armada was in battle formation, a well-ordered line abreast, and it covered two miles of sea. War had not been officially declared, so Effingham sent his pinnace the Disdain to fire at what he took to be the Spanish flagship. He was in fact mistaken, but Medina Sidonia took the point and hoisted Philip II’s royal standard at the main. Upon ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... Haven and the River Welland discharge into the Wash. The hypothetical breach was more than three miles from the Quadrant site, but the effects were severe. Taking predicted higher sea levels into account, a bad storm surge combined with a breach at that point in 2115 would cover the entire Quadrant site in water to a depth of between one and two ...”

“... my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Jarrell was drafted late in 1942. ‘Being in the army,’ he wrote, ‘is like being involved in the ...”