“... the majority of those infected, including nurses and other caregivers. Infectious-disease doctors may have had an unhealthy fascination with Ebola. But not entirely unhealthy, since Ebola and related pathogens seemed sure to be a bigger problem in the future. How could a zoonosis, once it jumped from animals to people and readily spread from human to ...”

“... determined the future of dynasties, so royal murders plunged kingdoms into crisis. Politics may not have produced as many corpses as Hamlet or Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous ...”

“... institutions that emerged under American hegemony fell short of these visions. The neoliberals may have been disappointed, but they were also motivated to fight the postwar consensus. From Switzerland, the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947, a group of intellectuals, businessmen and politicians, surveyed the European empires that had survived the ...”

“... does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ...”

“... missiles and bombers should target enemy nuclear forces rather than cities. Counterforce may appear sane when compared with the lunatic destruction favoured by previous plans, but the new proposals were potentially no less deadly: should the negotiations that were supposed to accompany strikes on missile installations and airfields fail, the ...”

“... Tel Aviv liberals who see Jerusalem as a hotbed of fanaticism and outmoded, Levantine customs. He may be an atheist now, but – again unlike most Israeli secularists – he remains comfortable around religious traditions that Israel’s founders viewed as primitive relics. The title of Warschawski’s book refers not only to his own experience of ...”

“... Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that mourning may be. We are always the subject of our own tears, but not the only subject; and knowing the many other reasons why we weep is a complicated affair, often ...”

“... on the plain wall behind them, which parallels the line of eye contact. Even the unsententious may be inclined to feel that some smart adage about blind youth is neatly embodied here, but Bersani and Dutoit argue that Caravaggio’s paintings provide ‘a visual speculation on the meaning and condition of knowledge’ and that this clever robber is ...”

“... second volume. It begins with a document concerning the first insurrection, in Sétif on 8 May 1945, and ends with the start of the war proper. The trouble in Sétif occurred when a procession led by Muslim boy-scouts, followed by women carrying placards demanding independence, clashed with some twenty gendarmes. In the ensuing violence, 27 Europeans ...”

“... to explain, even one as unfailingly shrewd as this. The explanation that comes quickest to mind may well be the right one, however. Malraux’s first wife, Clara, who enjoyed sniping at him after they’d split up, once observed that get him alone and he didn’t seem anything like so sure of himself as he did when he had an audience; thus boosterism ...”

“... that are accepted become as influential as truths, ‘it is a myth we ought to examine.’ Myths may become as influential as truths, but that does not make them truths. As always with such narratives of ‘decline’, it is hard to pin down where exactly things went wrong. When was ‘England’ last fully alive, according to Scruton? At times it seems that ...”

“... but no one is likely to call either Racine or Goethe a bard. So why Shakespeare? One reason may be that England had few contenders. Anglo-Saxon poetry was virtually forgotten. Even Chaucer was regarded as too rude and too hard to understand; not much point in adopting a national bard most people can’t follow. An obvious choice would have been ...”

“... awe’, occupation, settler colonialism, the idolatry of markets. Many Muslims, Atran believes, may experience these things, but very few take up arms or sacrifice their own lives in the name of the struggle. What is it that propels them? Equipped with a good interview technique, a sheaf of psychological questionnaires, support from the US air force, navy ...”

“... hub of the Scottish Folk Revival’. Instead, he seeks to establish him as a ‘genius’ who may have embraced whisky as a kind of sacrament. ‘It may well be,’ he said in the long obituary he wrote for the Guardian at the time of Henderson’s death in March 2002, ‘that the new Scotland – with its ...”

“... over the remaining 30 lives for the next couple of years: ‘My Lives creep on,’ he said in May 1780. In March 1781 the work was done. In the ‘Life of Pope’, Johnson described how the translation of the Iliad took longer than its author expected: ‘Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their terms of retardation; and every long ...”