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“... When Robinson Crusoe tries to convey what it felt like to be the sole survivor of a shipwreck, he finds himself at almost as much of a loss now, in the telling, as he was then, gloomily pacing the shoreline of an uncharted and to all appearances inhospitable island; until, that is, objects come to his rescue. He cannot describe the ‘thousand gestures and motions’ he made, in his moment of crisis, without any hope of a response ...”

“... illegitimate son of a French-born Marquis and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a plantation slave. Disowned by his father, he returned to France in 1786 and, taking his mother’s name, became a soldier. During the Revolution, he rose through the ranks and was a general at 33. He was a man of commanding presence, great courage and colossal physical strength: it was ...”

“... Hobbes wrote, is that ‘the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others.’ This knowledge is enough to make everyone afraid of everyone else. But it is very difficult to slip a knife between the shoulder blades of a state while its back is ...”

“... in the late 17th century and committed to unfettered critical inquiry. Hazard made this argument by showing that the founders of the Republic anticipated the philosophes in many of their lines of thought. As Diderot himself later acknowledged, ‘we had contemporaries during the age of Louis XIV’ (Jonathan Israel has recently restated this argument in a ...”

“... Sondheim is America’s master of musical theatre, as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed. His is a voice of solitude struggling to believe in company, and that of a lifelong game-player, so be careful about taking this book at face value as an autobiography, or as giving the whole ...”

“... the Shahab-3. Three Iranian scientists have been assassinated in the past two years, reputedly by Mossad, and there was suspicion that the blast was the latest strike in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear programme. Western intelligence sources say more assassinations are likely to follow. Hardliners in Iran have learned an important lesson from recent ...”

“... the war into an anti-aircraft unit, from which he deserted. He supported his family after the war by black-market dealing while he worked for his Abitur, before studying literature and philosophy at German universities and the Sorbonne. After completing a dissertation on the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano in 1955, he worked as a radio editor in ...”

“... By far the most striking image of Richard II is the one found in the great portrait of him, crowned and enthroned, which still survives in Westminster Abbey. Painted in the 1390s, when the king was in his twenties, it gives him a slightly boyish, even feminine appearance, with red cheeks, full lips and a small goatee beard ...”

“... War of Independence against Napoleon. But he insisted on the continuing relevance of this struggle by Spanish and British forces to expel French invaders from Spanish soil: the War of Independence, he declared, marked the beginning of a key form of modern warfare – ‘guerrilla’ or ‘partisan’ war, in which combatants refuse to recognise each other’s ...”

“... tribute to the British.’ The film was Mrs Miniver, whose heroine had come from a 1939 bestseller by the British writer Jan Struther. MGM’s 1942 movie had little else in common with her book, however, nor did its glossy portrait of a successful marriage correspond to the double life of Jan Struther. The film in fact took on an existence of its ...”

“... Now he has his own radio show – he started broadcasting in the US last year – and it should be no surprise that it is deeply nostalgic for the music of his own youth. What’s more surprising is that the show doesn’t sound at all dated. This is one of the wholly unexpected blessings of Dylan’s later years: it turns out that he is a wonderful disc ...”

“... a crowd of armed Christians gathered outside the Jewish quarter of Seville. They were dispersed by hired guards and government officials, but encouraged by a local archdeacon called Ferrán Martínez, the mob gathered again on 6 June. This time the quarter was destroyed, and most of its inhabitants killed or, at the ...”

“... come to that) who are building the artificial systems that may one day, perhaps quite soon, be able to perform many tasks that have traditionally been thought to require human intelligence. The prevailing mood of the conference is one of remorselessly practical problem-solving, mixed with occasional bursts of euphoria at how far machine learning has ...”

“... If​ there is a god of small things, it could be said to have taken up residence, for a while at least, in a remote valley in the northern highlands of Vietnam. A lush forest canopy spreads evenly up the slopes of the surrounding hills. On the valley floor sits a group of five single-storey concrete sheds with corrugated iron roofs, each opening onto a broad grassy enclosure ...”

“... a strong elected government with the parliamentary authority to take tough decisions or government by a left-wing clique beholden to the extra-parliamentary power of the unions, which lay behind a recent series of strikes. A showdown with the National Union of Mineworkers was imminent. ‘This time of strife has got to stop,’ Heath insisted in his opening ...”