“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Theseus was killed; so did the speed with which his death followed on the publication of his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his ...”

“... perestroika. Behind lay Poland in crazy convulsions of freedom and inflation, where a return first-class ticket to Vilnius with sleeper cost less than a double espresso in the Holiday Inn. There was a crowd round the iron stove at the end of the corridor. A dozen passengers pressed about the young uniformed conductress who normally gave out glasses of tea. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... first there was a conflict over the future of a BP joint venture in Russia; then there was the war with Georgia; and finally Putin’s Putinesque suggestion that the recalcitrant owner of Russia’s largest mining company should watch his health, ha ha. But since the collapse of the American stock indices the Russian exchanges have been plummeting. In fact ...”

“... dictatorship and the fight for the spoils of oil. But for all the talk of a booming middle class, and a surge in consumer goods and banking, Africa’s largest economy is still overwhelmingly dependent on income from oil and gas: it accounts for more than two-thirds of treasury revenue and 95 per cent of export earnings. The shale oil revolution in the ...”

“... enough – to lay out a considerable sum in her memory. Many slaves, especially male prisoners of war, were worked to death in mines and quarries, but slavery wasn’t racialised and inescapable as it is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Husbands commemorated slave-wives, and freed slaves did the same for their former masters. Everyone I’ve mentioned so far was a ...”

“... the majority, is bent on reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favour a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic ...”

“... Britain was still at the top table of the Big Three or Four, a Victor Power of the Second World War which should never be classed with mere nation-states like France or Albania. Back then, the media and politics thrived on the patriot superlative: this or that British bridge or factory chimney or ancient monument regulation was the longest or the tallest or ...”

“... and camels. Al-‘ajaj is dust stirred up by the wind. Al-rahaj wa-’l-qastal is the dust of war; al-khayda‘a, the dust of a battle. Al-‘ithyar, the dust of feet.’ Man is a microcosm of this sublime universe, as Book II, ‘On the Human Being’, conveys. The human has 360 bones and 360 veins, one for each day of the year. His faculty of reason ...”