“... than the outer one – the second is the one to be found ‘crying in a cocktail glass’, as we read in The Age of Anxiety – and the inner one had a field day when Auden was being rewarded for something. Although he was happy and flattered to return to Oxford to become Professor of Poetry, he had, at the same time, what he called ‘a very unpleasant ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”

“... them? The ‘few bad apples’ theory was widely discredited from its very first utterance by Donald Rumsfeld, so it is disheartening to see it replicated in some of the statements still coming from the MoD. But at the other extreme, the idea that a coherent mandate condoning torture runs all the way along the chain of command is also hard to credit, if ...”

“... Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to the duplicity was shock: ‘My relationship with my father was in ruins. I had ...”

“... waterboarded, and on what was gained, would help the US electorate evaluate the promises made by Donald Trump and other Republican candidates to bring waterboarding back. Hayden’s failure even to mention these discrepancies undermines his insistence that the intelligence community can help the public make informed decisions. The different demands of the ...”

“... contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ...”

“... isn’t one. It’s not sociology masquerading as fiction, which is the way Black novels are often read. ‘I don’t like my writing when it’s polemic,’ she told an interviewer. ‘As a human I love looking at the systemic issues, but as a writer I love the teeny-tiny instances that come from big socioeconomic issues.’ She’s deft with lists, executing ...”

“... advised rulers such as Dionysius of Syracuse. Then there’s the question of who’s meant to read prescriptive political philosophy that eschews a prescriptive political role for philosophers. Beside the stuff that pleases modern left secularists, such as Utopians’ communal property and their cautious attitude to war, there are some things they care ...”

“... had presided over uninterrupted economic growth, but it was weakened after its popular leader, Donald Tusk, left to take up the presidency of the European Council. (Tusk, a political alpha male, had made sure he had no prominent rivals or plausible successors.) Worse, the party was caught up in what came to be known as Waitergate. Illegal recordings from a ...”

“... devil bound them. Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, had to teach indigenous people to speak and read English, and even then couldn’t be sure that they had understood the gospels correctly.Catholic conquerors in the Americas certainly did win allegiance from tribes and nations by exploiting the potential for religious syncretism. Wooden monuments ...”

“... servant in the Department of the Environment and had met his mother, a part-time typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my ...”

“... of foreboding or foreknowledge in the poetry is gainsaid by the line-by-line surprises as you read it – as you move, say, from a ‘cigarette-end smouldering on a border’ to the ‘plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel’ to the ‘strangled orchards’ to ‘the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats’. These words all come from ‘Consider This ...”

“... bars, slashing his way through video games and death-metal lyrics, encountering a time-travelling Donald Duck. Even stranger, as a figure embraced by both the far right and the left, El Cid has also come to stand as an emblem of democracy and pluralism. Berend is writing with deicidal intent: once the myth has been fully exposed to the light of fact, she ...”

“... and easily reduced to reasonable terms, when you treat them with a high hand.’ The words read like something from Said’s Orientalism, the sentiments of a Balfour or Cromer, as parroted by a barrackroom sage or vainglorious subaltern, without the bland solvent of self-righteous statesmanship. In fact, they’re from Samuel Johnson’s first book, A ...”

“... good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards the glib or the showy (‘War is war and sometimes I think peace is too. Damn, there goes an epigram’), and often takes care to guard against it (‘didn’t ...”