“... but over the whole of the British Isles’ – just what was lost as a result? Logic suggests that we will find ourselves back in congenial company once we are divagating mentally in the early years of the 19th century, or the last years of the 18th. This is above all an attractive prospect in relation to sex. What ...”

“... history itself has a structural dynamic; that rather than studying the history of nations per se, we should think of nations as the structural elements of history – and there clearly is some structural oppositioning of Athens and Sparta in practice, but his particular elaborations of the principle do not stand up to examination. Either his oppositions seem ...”

“... machine impervious to their concerns’. But at the heart of her recollection of this scene, we find the sentence: ‘It was the first time I had ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.’ Merkel brings to her encounter with the turbot the eye (and thumbs) of a scientist. Yet there is more to it than that, because on ...”

“... examine their leading concepts (‘culture’, ‘evolution’) or place them in perspective than George Stocking of the University of Chicago. His brilliant essays and intellectual leadership have virtually built an academic specialty. And Victorian Anthropology is unquestionably his masterpiece, a work of precision, subtlety and historical irony. Two ...”

“... of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida. Then, as George Bush took the US to war, all that remained for the INC and its leaders was to sit back and prepare for government. Many in Washington believe that, for better or worse, the US will go to war with Iran and that the MEK will have a role to play. But ...”

“... Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq ...”

“... David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now ...”

“... banners, slogans, posters, cards, photographs of deformed babies, cartoons of Blair, Brown and Bush, the parliamentary voting records of MPs, grubby teddy bears and toys (as well as the plastic sheets and cans that constituted Haw’s accommodation). They acted under Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act: a rather heavy legal vehicle ...”

“... in Chicago – and have come back to Clarksdale to escape the racism in the north for the ‘devil we know’. They decide to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and ...”

“... and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum ...”

“... a big vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over ...”

“... to Martin Luther King – a place to stand against recent orthodoxies from Kennedy to Reagan and Bush. Impatient with easy liberal scapegoating of religious faith, Wills rescues a politics of religious commitment from the clutches of right-to-life fanaticism and a sacralised US mission. For Bercovitch, however, religion is the original sin. The Puritan shift ...”

“... The whole continent is written off as a place where good things can happen – a place where, in George W. Bush’s memorable phrase, ‘wings take dream’. It is left to rot. Welcome to the world of post-modern politics. This scenario (or something like it) is laid out by Philip Bobbitt in the course of describing three ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... The refuse is the unexploded US ordnance which litters the countryside. Through Page’s eyes we see the beauty of Vietnam as well as the horror and the excitement of the war that held so many bao chi – the Vietnamese for ‘reporter’ – with an often blinding fascination. ‘The war days had been the ultimate in experience.’ Page dreamily ...”