“... a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious … a rehabilitation of spiritualism.’ Spinozism was part of this: ‘the latest example of ...”

“... to kill anyone. (Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day, vowed in a comment on a YouTube video that ‘Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten.’) Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been ...”

“... last week has been a real drama – living, leaping & throbbing, with the acts bounding over from day to day – on a huge national stage.Once​ the throbbing was over, there was a vacuum in Irish public life. In his 1922 essay ‘Ireland after Parnell’, Yeats noted that he had predicted the rise of ‘an intellectual ...”

“... was before the Polizia Postale arrived at the villa. Trying to piece together what happened on the day following the murder, let alone the night of the crime, is tortuous. Sollecito told the postal police that they suspected there’d been a break-in: there was a broken window in the bedroom belonging to Filomena Romanelli, one of Knox and Kercher’s two ...”

“... an inefficient, authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that ...”

“... stature. Far more than any of his contemporaries he cut through the conventional wisdom of his day, and though implacably devoted to the task in hand, he always took the long view. He shocked Dulles, at the height of the Cold War, by informing him that Communism was a passing phenomenon, that the notion of a single ‘Western’ interest was absurd and ...”

“... its readiness to dictate terms to his government. In that event, Cromer replied, before election day there would be no sterling reserves left. In which case, said Wilson, they would let sterling float. In which case, shouted Cromer, there would be an international financial crisis (there wouldn’t, of course: Britain floated the pound without difficulty in ...”

“... themes. ‘An Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic concept had come from Sydney Newman, the recently appointed head of drama at the BBC. He was looking for something that would hold children, teenagers and adults in the then-as-now transitional Saturday teatime slot, between ...”

“... on the window-sill.’ Certainly, as Miller illustrates with copious reference to the historian Douglas Shand-Tucci’s studies of homosexual Boston at the turn of the century, Eliot’s Harvard provided ample opportunities for him to cast off his Midwestern earnestness and metamorphose into ‘a very gay companion’, ‘an aesthete’ and ‘a ...”

“... major and recurrent threat. Faced with a Parliament that was (in the phrase of the legal historian Douglas Hay) stupendously over-representative of the wealthiest, the disenfranchised turned to political reform. It is relevant, therefore, that the period covered by these books opens in the aftermath of Peterloo: political discontent was now being met not with ...”

“... into the Robin Hood films, and Knight helps us to see each in the context of its time. In the Douglas Fairbanks silent Robin Hood (1922), Robin’s decision to return from the Crusades reflected contemporary American isolationism: stay out of wars in Europe. The Errol Flynn film The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) imagined a New Deal camp in Sherwood ...”

“... by media greedy for stories about sex, the leggy Jay twins (daughters of the Labour politician, Douglas Jay) and campus revolutions. Briggs, as dean of social sciences, was boosterish about his learning reforms, although much more radical changes, including the Scottish pattern of a generalist first year, had already been introduced at the pioneering ...”

“... in Swahili, ‘a journey’. Hence one rings up a black African publisher’s salesman in present-day Nairobi and is told he is ‘on safari’ by his black secretary. This does not mean that he is stalking beasts on the Masai steppe, but that he is touring shops and schools. Cameron suggests that the word ‘came into popular use through officialdom ...”

“... and a denim work shirt open to the third button. He was muscular, genial, unabashed. That first day, I recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of ...”

“... The number is right.’ I heard him explain the discrepancy: ‘Now, are some getting killed every day? Sure. Are some retiring at various times or injured? Yes, they’re gone.’ I remembered that a year before he had said the number was 210,000. I heard the Pentagon announce it would no longer release Iraqi troop figures. I heard that 50,000 US soldiers in ...”