“... information by physically and psychologically abusing their prisoners: ‘each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation programme pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.’ According to ...”

“... chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and ...”

“... very different from each other, culminating in two formidably sophisticated pieces of work: John Kerrigan’s New Penguin edition (1986) and Colin Burrow’s Oxford one (2002). Their long, informative and illuminating introductions might be expected to have solved all possible problems. But the difficulties of the Sonnets are of a kind that enmeshes ...”

“... anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no ...”

“... of Sikh extremism in the 1980s in Punjab, we find it has an eerie resonance with the events that took place in Washington and New York. For Mrs Gandhi, the Congress Party – a euphemism for herself and her family – represented democracy, stability and secularism; and, in order to perpetuate Congress rule, she used every undemocratic means at her ...”

“... the war, he emigrated to America, taught at Bard, participated in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, took his PhD only in 1959 (his thesis on Mallarmé and Yeats still awaits full publication), and served as a teacher at Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich before settling at Yale in 1970. And although his earliest essays appeared in French during ...”

“... government” ’, which defended security of tenure by violence and intimidation. A tenant who took over a farm from which the previous tenant had been evicted was violently punished. The groups who carried out the violence would now be called terrorists, but these ‘enforcers of the “unwritten law” were representatives, or in some sense agents, of ...”

“... was living at the time, and play crashing discords on the piano. Eventually, his mother came and took him away. The effect of this story, which Carpenter appears to have included simply for its strangeness, is suddenly to make us aware of how immersed we have become in the enclosed universe of the great man’s life. Biographies often give the impression ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... has many precedents, but what was remarkable this time was that, two months before the coup took place, a plan describing almost the exact course of events was leaked to the press. The plot had been rumbled, but it succeeded anyway.Where was the civil and political opposition? The religious conservative Ennahda Party, still the best organised political ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served ...”

“... proved adept at finding a range of love nests in Amherst, and even, or so their diaries suggest, took to experimenting with group sex.* As soon as Emily was no longer alive to prevent it, Austin made over to the Todds a plot of land on which they built a thirteen-room house called the Dell, where Austin, Mabel and her husband, David, established what seems ...”

“... wavelength makes possible the denser packing of information on CD discs, but last year Nakamura took his ingenuity to the University of California, Santa Barbara – part of a brain drain that a stagnating Japan cannot afford.Something even more fundamental seems to be inhibiting the Japanese economy. ‘We have the bad luck to be in the downward phase of ...”

“... highlight seems to have been seeking out the reclusive philosophical eminence F.H. Bradley, who took time to show him around Merton College.After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and ...”

“... but there is no plaque, or anything like that. When their father died in 1933, Beckett’s brother took over the business, while Beckett, who was idling at the time, took the attic room. Like all idlers, he made many promises. He promised himself that he would write and he promised his mother that he would give language ...”