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“... of its visual tricks (tricks?). It was one thing for Tolstoy to describe mighty battles in War and Peace but it was absurd, in the era of celluloid, for novelists to attempt such a feat when the cinema could do the job so much better. The novel should find a new function for itself. Back to James Joyce, in a way, who opened the first cinema in Dublin in ...”

“... who had built an empire on this foundation. Both Howard Johnson and Margery Post are interested in peace and quiet, Johnson as a business commodity, Margery as a necessity of life. To disturb such interests, the brothers Disney arrive, trying to plant a new Disney world on Miss Post’s door-step and in the backyard of the Johnson motel business. A fight of ...”

“... insists, was contrived by the Prime Minister in order to avoid acceptance of a set of Peruvian peace proposals which would have deprived her of ‘the military victory which was what the Falklands was all about from an early stage’. He also detects her hand in the leaking of a letter from the Solicitor-General in the affair of the Westland helicopter ...”

“... into that of causality is not, as Russell once said it was, a purely arbitrary stipulation. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which is usually judged to be his principal contribution to philosophy, though he himself preferred his later and more polished Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, was first ...”

“... He sang songs about mothers; about drugs, about being enskied by LSD; and about the love and peace preached by the protesting flower-children of the Sixties. In all this, to use an expression of his own, a ‘double fantasy’ is projected, causing us to be in doubt whether he is facing in the direction of other people or turning his back. How can a ...”

“... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading ...”

“... Sebastopol, with its wash of grey sky over a stack of black landscape, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, the town at its centre tiny, visible only in matchstick detail. Elsewhere Crimea, under the unforgiving sun, is rendered lunar, or Martian – pitted, rubbly, leached of shade, the scrub on the cliffs like spotted mould. Fenton made an ...”

“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”

“... knew the Old Testament. Upavon’s chapel is called the Cave of Adullam, the stronghold where David sought refuge from Saul’s armies (1 Samuel), presumably as a reminder of the persecution suffered by dissenters; Little Zoar, near Calne, is evidence of the fortress mentality of those strict Calvinists among the Baptists who believed that only the Elect ...”

“... the Black Prince winning his spurs and, by the end of the year, both John II of France and David II of Scotland safely locked up in the Tower of London awaiting ransom. Mission accomplished. Except it wasn’t. Sumption takes us on through the chevauchées – the large-scale mounted raids that the English used to weaken and demoralise the French in ...”

“... one informant – a chaplain’s assistant – that she thought it ‘would not help the cause of peace’. He added that nothing she said ‘could be construed to be undermining the US government’. The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who ...”

“... Guided at times by Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner and David Brion Davis conceived slavery as a mode of organising labour, as well as a system of racial domination. This led to the recognition that advocates of ‘free labour’ had economic as well as humanitarian reasons for opposing slavery, and that the Northern ...”

“... He was the man with the ideas.’At Lie’s insistence, Bunche carried on solo, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his mediation – the first Black man to win a Nobel and, suddenly, the most famous Black public figure in America. Lie’s successor as secretary-general, the Swedish diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld, continued sending his ...”

“... Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes: There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in ...”

“... the examples our lawmakers bear in mind when they frame a policy of response in the days to come. David Bromwich New Haven The news from the Middle East is not all bad. The savagery of the attacks on 11 September has, in at least one country, brought Muslim militancy into disrepute and swelled the ranks of the moderates. At the main public prayers in Tehran ...”