“... intended, for all your rational revulsion or boredom or disapproval of the outworn ideologies they may sanction. The last dissenting emotion is perhaps the one most frequently aroused at present. Children’s stories from the past are continually disparaged for being insufficiently egalitarian, or wide-ranging, or whatever. Robert Leeson, in Reading and ...”

“... to describe and to make a case for the element of critical scholarship that Classical education may contain. Textual criticism is an important kind of critical scholarship, but it is not the only kind: one must discover what the authors actually wrote, but one must also determine the reliability of the documents and monuments surviving from the Ancient ...”

“... of the universe, and the burden of this knowledge she did bear: ‘nor is it written that you may not grieve.’ She did because he thought she did. Yet this woman could never have existed as a serious entity – this woman who could engage, with her incompetent lover G. Phibbs, on a work to define the whole scope of human knowledge – had Graves not ...”

“... speeches that barely mention the MEK. In recent months the Obama administration has indicated it may put a halt to these events. The Treasury is investigating whether speakers have been receiving funds from a designated terrorist organisation. What they want to know, in other words, is whether the Iranian exiles who paid the speakers’ fees are an MEK ...”

“... punishment is required by the fact that he was a soldier working in intelligence. Assange may be a crusader but he was not enlisted for his country, or anyone’s, when he posted nearly half a million ‘significant action’ logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and a quarter of a million diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks, all of them sourced by a thoughtful ...”

“... deliciously of cigars and eau de Portugal’. Ridley suggests that ‘his fluency in German’ may have been one of the factors slowing down his learning since it ‘interfered with his speaking of English’. Yet his parents worried that the boy wasn’t German enough. His marriage – an arranged union with the waif-like Princess Alexandra of Denmark ...”

“... interpretations, are summarily entertained and dismissed. However commendable a lack of clarity may be in fiction or verse, Runciman points out, it ill serves these authors’ avowed aim of writing a how-to guide for aspirant guardians, autocrats or proletarian revolutionaries. Nor are they to be read primarily as religion, or literature. Given the title of ...”

“... and Somalia, for example – is extremely difficult to measure, so it’s possible that there may be a bigger shortwave audience out there than we know. Where audiences can listen to the World Service on the better quality FM, they do so. But FM transmitters have limited reach beyond urban areas, and in many parts of the world they are prohibitively ...”

“... organisation on unsuspecting civilian targets and a massive Japanese attack on a naval base may seem a misjudgment, but it was not surprising. That a president would use such a crisis for his own purposes – Roosevelt effectively, Bush disastrously – might also have been expected. But that ‘Ground Zero’, the hypocentre of the first nuclear bomb ...”

“... own media-infested homes. ‘Time and space – time to be alone, space to move about – these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.’ This prediction by the naturalist Edwin Way Teale seems both prescient and poignant. We already live in a world in which time to be alone and space to move about are attainable by the rich perhaps, but a matter ...”

“... in one respect because the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to camera, with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him, knows his report will feature high up in any newscast. ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ is an old American media adage. The drama of battle ...”

“... heard of it recently, possibly because officials recognise that the problems with the technology may be insurmountable. In a scramjet engine, air passes through the engine at supersonic speed and is ignited by the fuel to generate thrust. But the slightest perturbation in the airflow – as during manoeuvres – leads to shockwave disruption in the smooth ...”

“... the University of Miami candidly explains to a table of Florida estate agents that the sea level may rise by 15 feet over the next eighty years. One ‘expensively dressed real estate broker’ at the table responds ‘like a six-year-old on the verge of a temper tantrum … “This can’t be a fear-fest … Why is everyone picking on Miami?”’ At an art ...”

“... Geof instead. Helen and Jo, it seems, don’t expect to live stupidly ever after.Helen and Jo may have low expectations but they have strong desires – for romance, sex, fun, colour, ‘a taste of honey’. Men offer that, if only fleetingly, and Helen and Jo grab it with both hands. ‘Listen, love, I’m old enough to be your mother,’ Helen tells ...”

“... to withdraw his trust from the ideas he has picked up over the years from his senses. They may not be perfectly systematic or ideally precise, and he knows they have sometimes misled him; but he sees no point in supposing that his entire experience of the world might be shot through with vanity and delusion. He tries to reassure himself by recalling a ...”