“... Hollywood finance on Leaving Las Vegas.) Modern Hollywood is in denial about booze. Hard drinking may still have a glimmer of the macho aura that surrounded it when the Hemingway-influenced generation of screenwriters filled the studio writers ‘buildings in the Thirties, but in Nineties blockbuster movies even policemen and criminals mostly drink ...”

“... of Liberty has recently identified as a central component of the colonists’ world view. Clark may have erred in making militant Protestantism the hegemonic language of colonial politics, completely overshadowing secular political discourse, but his account helps to explain why the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted toleration to the Catholic Church in ...”

“... says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to the other great – perhaps the great – bore of the year. Let me defer here to Adolph Reed, who is emerging as one of the few black American essayists worth reading in a period of intensifying racism and of ...”

“... to live, they will have to construct fantasies, lavish internal fictions. At such moments, they may resemble the community they are escaping; they may simply substitute their own singular private fantasy for a shared public one. And they will do this not with desperation but with mild comedy. One of Munro’s narrators ...”

“... and petty neuroses of her clan and brood. But does she truly deserve such a dispensation? Monarchs may be able to elude responsibility for many things, but surely the state of the monarchy is not among them. And the Queen made at least two decisions of her own which contributed to the present zoo-like condition of her relatives. The first was her choice of ...”

“... help the million or so Kosovars in whose name Serbia is being bombed. Its principal achievements may be to ensure the death of the ‘new world order’ famously heralded by George Bush after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, and to destroy an institution that has helped to prevent international wars for over half a century. In 1945, the United States and ...”

“... Realise that the other party is not obligated to be anything like he/she says, and in fact may be playing a joke on you.’ (Go to Furry MUCK at furry.com if you are a tinybit curious.) It’s not all fun and games. Some promising educational initiatives use MOOs (go to telnet ‘moolano.berkeley.edu 8888’ for a demonstration). Educational MOOs ...”

“... was two years from the signing of the Agreement, a period subsequently defined as ending in May 2000 – but no date was specified for starting the process. By contrast, the Executive was to be set up quite quickly. The Unionists were bound to be displeased with this interpretation of the timing of events. Some were not prepared to accept the absence of ...”

“... green hat’. A dreadful tale starts emerging in fits and glimpses as to why this family’s story may have gone so wrong. It’s stuff like stuff we’ve all heard about before, a dysfunctional family system, complicated and subtle, an accumulation of little things sliding out of true. But I’m not going to list these things, because the minute you do so, it ...”

“... here – ‘entertain’ might be more appropriate. For Donoghue’s Stevens it is ‘as if’ I may entertain the fiction that it’s sunny outside when it’s raining; but exquisite as my conviction may be, I’m still getting wet. Then again, it’s ‘as if’ I’m really still dry. None of which seems to me to refute ...”

“... we simply go from one death to another in this book, since death is all there is, so to speak, we may get the impression that Derrida is a perpetual mourner, scarcely engaged in anything apart from expressing and failing to express his grief. And yet the occasions are spaced over time in a way their proximity on the page quite belies – Barthes died in ...”

“... the trench is more likely to have been covered over by other soldiers out of respect; the bayonets may have been planted to mark a mass grave. But the significance of the site was assured, given Pétain’s status as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ and France’s saviour, according to the young Captain Charles de Gaulle – wounded and taken prisoner under ...”

“... with close-cropped blond hair and he was wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers. To an Iraqi he may have looked as if he were working for the CPA. As he stood in a crowd outside the museum a man walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. There are 55,000 US troops in and around Baghdad but they seem curiously ...”

“... desire for unattainable precision and curious universal truths is also a Romantic trait, and it may be that some of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism will come to be seen as a late flowering of the Romantic spirit. When the various definitions are brought together, they tend to suggest that the Romantics were writers and artists who knew ...”

“... its intricate constitution and federal structure, presided over by the Grand Lodge. British clubs may have seemed obsessed with petty regulations and schoolboy ceremonial – all those silly hats, weird initiation rites, secret oaths and queer titles, ballots and blackballs, to say nothing of arcane toasts, songs, drinking customs and fines – but these ...”