“... the same diagnosis. It isn’t just that Archie could hardly have escaped hearing about this; Cary may have wondered if there was insanity in his family line.His system was in shock; there were stories of a suicide attempt, and these books understand that his urbanity could sometimes be reduced to tatters. His relationship with Cherrill was in ruins. It had ...”

“... prepared to put the blame on a particular institution. The ‘onset of the movies’, he argues, may well have proved the ‘most influential’ of all innovations in the ‘process’ of modern warfare. The fact that the enduring tension between martial fantasy and an awareness of damage done is unlikely to be resolved any time soon adds a flavour of ...”

“... under their own momentum. One just knows he’d be a hopeless conversationalist. Magical Urbanism may seem pedestrian by comparison with the books on Southern California, whose success led to reprisals by the powerful sectors in LA he had upset by his exposures. According to Ben Ehrenreich, he was ‘driven from the city by a campaign of Red-baiting disguised ...”

“... wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):But we have to ...”

“... mistakenness or even duplicity? At any rate, when the outside doesn’t match the inside, things may be going, or have gone, awry. That boundary is not so simple.It’s possible I am overthinking this imaginary moment of early scripture. But it fascinates me that introducing a dialectic of inside and outside polarises the attributes of each and ...”

“... of theoretical bids, then the expectant pause just below the low estimate. Well, I thought, I may as well start things off, and clicked on the ‘bid’ button. And waited; and waited. But I was the sole bidder, and the auctioneer was duly grateful to me. I was filled with a prideful exultation: uxoriously, I had completed my wife’s collection.I ...”

“... of a decade, one worldview was seemingly discredited and another took its place. While historians may baulk at the tidy chronology, the idea that there was during this period a paradigm shift in capitalist regulation has proved seductive, and scholars in many fields have busied themselves describing how the ideological wheel turned. An enormous amount of ...”

“... this approach, that it replaces the problems of majority rule with the problems of minority rule, may be correct but misses the point, which is ethical not operational: people, born free, shouldn’t have to abide by decisions that affect them but to which they do not consent. Non-coercive social relations must be prefiguratively and painstakingly built in ...”

“... but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man River’. To him it seemed obvious that India and Pakistan should share the water of the Indus. The British chair of the Punjab Boundary Commission agreed, and told both countries’ leaders ...”

“... to chair the SNC but was kept on a short leash, being re-elected only for three-month terms. By May 2012 he had abandoned his opposition to the militarisation of the anti-Assad movement, but then abruptly decided that his position had become untenable and resigned. On 11 November 2012 a new body to speak for the Syrian opposition abroad was established, the ...”

“... but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.Eliot’s considerable correspondence ...”

“... vague and characteristically harsh’, Spurling conjectures that with ingenuous good looks, he may have suffered from unwanted advances in a setting where homosexuality was not unusual. Certainly his main later complaint was the impossibility of any relation with girls, under vigilant bar by the authorities. There was also his lack of money for the lavish ...”

“... reason for getting out of bed in the morning, then the Western, if not the global, identity crisis may be solvable. That is where the ‘clash of civilisations’ comes in. By identifying our enemies, Huntington hopes to re-enchant the post-Cold War world, to restore our sense of purpose, and of course to raise the prestige of the military in Western ...”

“... friend of Dickens’s Mrs Gamp, and Thurber was a writer before he was a cartoonist); and it may be that the ‘extra’ dimension in this cartoon came about because its essential idea had first been established by another and earlier writer. Somewhere at the back of his mind Thurber was surely remembering, with profit and perhaps with gratitude, a poem ...”

“... soldier on with no real legitimacy, while the weight of support for change builds up. The overhang may persist for a while yet, but a small event could trip the avalanche.Alastair Crooke is co-director of Conflicts Forum and has been an EU mediator with Hamas and other Islamist movements. Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution will come out next ...”