“... death close linkedHad paced the enormous cloud, almost had won            War on the sun;Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,            Hands, wings, are found.The prosaic detail behind this was that ‘Marston’ was in the University Flying Club; but Spender conjures him into a zooming superhero, a doomed Lawrentian ...”

“... and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. He lived there until 1961, when, with the Algerian war of independence nearing its end, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Henriette, in the Yonne, south-east of Paris. By this time, his parents had divorced. Michel only saw them during the holidays. ‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a ...”

“... away, she followed. A recruitment phase began. The women were mostly from broken down middle-class families. Manson told them they were beautiful and nothing was their fault. The message was to do away with guilt and shame, with the ego, with worldly possessions, with the hang-ups of the outside world. He would fill the void. He started saying he was the ...”

“... two most personal books, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which he declared war on Platonic philosophy. Yet these books only hinted at the radicalism of his intentions.Deleuze and Guattari had an instant intellectual rapport. Both men were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of ...”

“... Home’, he provides this portrait of his father late in life: My father, who had flown in World War I, Might have continued to invest his life In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife. But the race was run below, and the point was to win. Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze (Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six) The soul eclipsed by ...”

“... were actors. It has been estimated that in the decades following the third and final Punic War, when Rome won its decisive victory over Carthage (146 BC), some 30 or 40 per cent of the population of Italy were slaves. Many slaves were literate, some of them very highly educated. Cicero’s beloved secretary, Tiro, inventor of the first known system of ...”

“... American canon. In 1965 Invisible Man was chosen as the most distinguished novel since World War Two by a collection of ‘200 prominent authors, critics and editors’ for Book Week magazine. In 1978, when Wilson Quarterly canvassed professors of American literature on the most important novels published in the United States since World ...”

“... oratory, drama, magnificent buildings – but it was also a violent, faction-ridden, capricious, war-mongering, slave-owning society, clinging precariously to its privileged position, and regularly picking fights it couldn’t win. It doesn’t exactly sound like the Google (company motto: ‘Don’t be evil’) of the ancient world. However, Josiah Ober is ...”

“... on the struggle against Fascism – in Spain and then, with the rise of Nazism and the onset of war, throughout most of Europe. After the war the AIA divided, basically between pro and anti-Soviet wings, or, in more general terms, between an increasingly politicised and an increasingly depoliticised wing. Berger, at that ...”

“... parts, a point essential to Sahlins’s analysis. During one month there is a period of renewal, war is forbidden, and affairs are largely in the charge of priests who honour the mythical return of a god and ex-king Lono. Then, they make love, not war. For the other 11 months, however, ...”

“... that the one can fill in the gaps of the other, encouraging the dangerous myth that Alexander’s war with Darius somehow prefigures early modern encounters of Europeans with the New World, as if the Macedonians were discovering the Persia they had actually grown up with. Then again, the fact-finding mentality separates style from substance. With his ...”

“... of them has been reprinted.) ‘It’ was going to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should be’. According to his biographer ...”

“... of Argentina: he thinks it is an ‘agrarian feudalistic society’ with a ‘small urban middle class’. Dr Goebel, he speculates, was an anti-colonialist from the ‘vociferous’ Yale Law School, which gave him the ‘subconscious motive’ for writing on this subject. Perhaps, but the single-minded grind looks more like the eternal PhD student to ...”

“... excerpt from Das Prinzip Hoffnung; between, there is a shorter selection from Bloch’s inter-war writings on musical topics. The essays on The Threepenny Opera, on Stravinsky and on Wagner which immediately and with challenging effect followed the ‘Philosophy of Music’ in the 1974 anthology have not been included, but on historical grounds certainly ...”

“... by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss were premiered at the Proms before the First World War. But in the beginning, Wood’s programmes were much less demanding, often consisting of many short items, so as not to bore the audience. This was especially true of the early final concerts, and it has remained true of the Last Night. The programme for the ...”