“... that her presence saved the lives of the other staff on several occasions. Norman Cigar and Paul Williams argue that war crimes prosecutions are necessary not simply for the well-rehearsed reasons – ending cultures of impunity, achieving ‘closure’, restoring faith in due process – but because they seek to establish individual responsibility ...”

“... dialogue; or as Weight puts it in the first subheading of his introduction: ‘Amphetamines, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Lee Hooker’. Which is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This ...”

“... signed the armistice Gary stole a plane with some friends, made his way to Britain by way of North Africa, and joined the Free French. By the end of the war he was a member of the Légion d’honneur and the Ordre de la Libération, having survived an improbable number of bombing missions – on one he had to talk a blinded pilot through the landing ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... murder of several members of the South Korean Government in Burma in 1983 is flatly attributed to North Korea, but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this. Of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II Laqueur can only comment that ‘the extent of Bulgarian involvement cannot be proven in a court of ...”

“... airport. It wasn‘t a random juxtaposition of places: the Rev. Hazlitt’s family were from the North of Ireland, and at some level my interest in his son’s writings must issue from a recognition that their combative Whig mentality and natural jouissance are rooted far back in the Ulster Enlightenment, especially in the work of Francis Hutcheson, the ...”

“... scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and ...”

“... in mutual incomprehension and loathing, with entirely different campaigns being fought in the North and the South (where for the most part Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot). Dewey died in the summer of 1952, so the last election he was able to follow all the way through was the one four years earlier, when Harry Truman beat Thomas Dewey (no ...”

“... a harsh reassessment. Carlyle had earlier translated the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally ...”

“... Ovalle first saw the real-world mercenary processing centre run by the private firm Blackwater in North Carolina, he had to reach for the imagery of Cubby Broccoli. ‘It’s a private army in the 21st century,’ he gushed to Jeremy Scahill. It was like out of a Dr No movie … It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city ...”

“... to return to rural Georgia after around five years spent pursuing a career as a writer in the North. The parallel is one of the many in-jokes in O’Connor’s fiction. Like Asbury, O’Connor found herself desperately ill on a train journey south. Initially it was thought she was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, but tests in February 1951 revealed ...”

“... continent, colleges were started from scratch – Stellenbosch, Cape Town, Witwatersrand. In the north, existing institutions such as al-Azhar in Cairo, a centre of Islamic scholarship, were ‘modernised’ and new disciplines introduced. The Humboldt model aimed to produce universal scholars, men and women who stood for excellence, regardless of ...”

“... first transcend the boundaries of its geographical origins, adopted by the plains Indians to the north and then, in the late 19th century, starting to attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies and chemists.The trade in peyote beyond its natural habitat is probably as ancient as its use by humans. The buttons were dried in the desert sun and easily ...”

“... lessons in military prowess, colonial expansion and administration. Throughout the Western and North Atlantic world, as European and North American regimes grabbed ever larger swathes of the world’s landmass, Dio and Gibbon continued to shape curricula up to university level. Everything from the third century ce ...”

“... connection with one still uproven fact of limited general significance’. On the other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air and the sort of book we need more of, and Ernest Gellner was equally enthusiastic about its intellectual daring. I thought it was a splendid piece of work: a small book with large implications. Moreover, in its main ...”