“... Unsurprisingly, some finessing of the notion of blame often takes place here: the possessed addict may have chosen a lifestyle that lends itself to possession – he may have hung around with unsavoury people, made a variety of unwise choices and so on. But the basic point remains: he was taken by his addiction, he didn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enough to be used as subjects for an evening’s light entertainment. Bizarre as such a spectacle may seem, it makes sense to think of magazines as characters: like people, they have friends, enemies, social characteristics and guiding motivations (however quixotic). Literary historians these days are discouraged from spending too much time with individual ...”

“... how he would tell Spender about me when Spender returned to London.’ Plante’s later diaries may tell a different story, but the present selection is full of the kind of youth-mongering that appears to slide naturally into young-fogeyism. You won’t find David and Nikos smoking the hard stuff with Mick and Keith. Plante is living out the fantasy of ...”

“... notably a shot of him inside a cot with the two children, happiness scarcely threatened. She may also mean to glance at what Robert Zaretsky in his critical study calls Camus’s ‘serial infidelities’ and Alain Vircondelet in his new biography refers to as ‘donjuanisme’; but if so this is her only glance, apart from a mention of Camus’s ...”

“... on a book spine refers to what is inside the volume’. He pursues the speculation further: ‘We may have here an early hint of an important component of religious thought: immanence. Gods and supernatural powers can be inside statues, mountains, lakes, seas, nature itself, and of course people.’ We also have here – though the fact does not concern ...”

“... question, once the northwest passage is open). Some of the effects that an open Arctic Ocean may have on international relations, energy security and global trade are explored in The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson.* But the idea that a thawing Arctic is something to be afraid of would have baffled our ancestors. For the men who sailed ...”

“... for being so slow; the boy was only 19. Iris had been hiding in plain sight. Black’s emotions may have been, in the circumstances, quite strong. He was a man trained to listen, but not to this. Iris may have talked this way to everyone – religious people can be so intense – but it is possible that not all of them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence – an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve, a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more ...”