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“... to denote women’s clothing worn by men in the 19th century. It had a theatrical context, and may have derived from the dragging of skirts along the ground. Nowadays, if a man wears women’s clothes either for the purpose of a sexual thrill or because he wishes to pass as a woman, the term drag is inappropriate. Drag must involve exaggeration, even ...”

“... De Waal moves up several levels from genes and genomes to explore how individual animals may have evolved to want to help each other. He has a wonderful photograph of a dog stepping daintily over the head of a recumbent tiger, who opens an eye to look up as she passes. They live together in a zoo in Thailand. Zookeepers gave three tiger cubs to the ...”

“... actually is and, second, whether he is guilty of a crime known to the law. Captured guerrillas may have little ultimately to hope for, but they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a ...”

“... of a citadel. Life-giving fictions have yielded to noxious myths – myths, the book warns, ‘may kill us yet’. The distinction between fiction and myth is discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending. Roughly speaking, myths are fictions that have forgotten their own fictional status and taken themselves as real. Liberals like Brooks fear ...”

“... 110 of HMG’s own White Paper, ‘The Falklands Campaign: The Lessons’, we read: ‘On 2 May, HMS Conqueror detected the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, accompanied by two destroyers, sailing near to the total exclusion zone.’ This was the scenario presented to us, not only in the official White Paper, but in the Commander-in-Chief’s no less ...”

“... how one should live; even the character formation of third parties is not something for which we may expect to find comprehensive methods, Thomas Arnold and Benjamin Spock notwithstanding. Nor is the main reason even the fact, which Williams discusses at some length, that certain admirable dispositions are intrinsically unsuited to being the object of ...”

“... so guarded against discovery that if the officer should be disposed to carry off a bank-bill, he may do it with impunity, since there is no man cap able of proving either the taker or the thing taken.’ None of these is an argument against surveillance by the police or any other State agency, and they were not intended as such in Entick v. Carrington. They ...”

“... the paterfamilias. The slave often sides with the son against the father, and the rebellious slave may sometimes stand in for the even more threatening figure of the rebellious son. The patriarchal system, which allows for little or no autonomy on the part of the lower members of the household (sons, daughters, wives and slaves), is unstable, since any one of ...”

“... in order.’ Art remains ‘the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced’. You may think he should have been on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern – and the style – to persuade him momentarily to accept a substitute for the force and beauty of art, something for which he had, on his own account, expressly ...”

“... only with skills of a peculiar and precious kind, which have hitherto proved communicable but may not, in Bloom’s opinion, be so much longer. He would never allow it to be assumed that the canon offers easy reads. On the contrary, the dedicated labour it requires ensures that its devotees, like the canon itself, must be an élite. ‘Aesthetic value ...”

“... to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey ...”

“... This could happen because of loss of endowments and assets. For example, epidemic disease may reduce the fitness to work of agricultural workers (loss of labour endowment); farmers may be forced to sell land or livestock in order to survive, thereby reducing their ability to produce and to survive in the next period ...”

“... after all. ‘The difference between his description and ours,’ in Richard Rorty’s words, ‘may mean that he should not be tried under our laws. It does not mean that he cannot be explained by our science.’ Realism, the doctrine that things are as they are independent of any description of them, can only be false for things which just are their ...”

“... possibly by Hitler will cost you roughly $4500. The 1938 Mercedes which he gave to Eva Braun may cost you $350,000. You can find the trade prices in Der Gauleiter, a magazine published in Arkansas. The annual turnover is estimated at $50 million. As the economic function of the villages of Western Europe and the United States gradually becomes that of ...”

“... What is history, asks Dr Johnson, but ‘a record of wars, treasons and calamities?’ This may be too brusque a summary, but there is really not much history worth cultivating on its own account, or for the sake of keeping alive an industry made up of a swarm of academic grubbers each hidden inside his own molehill ...”