“... We are cheering for them, but the cheering does drown out quite a lot of other noises. ‘Viewers may ask,’ David Denby says in his very good review of this film in the New Yorker, ‘why it’s supposed to be better that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in Harlem were destroyed by black gangsters rather than by ...”

“... grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.The beginning of my obsession coincided ...”

“... this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a lecturer in the University of Cape Town’s English department, replied: The information you suggest suggests that I settle for a particular identity I should feel most uneasy in. A few words about my schooling, for ...”

“... and, more violently, how much they loved the heavily lipglossed singer in a band called Japan. David Sylvian was his name. The girls called him David. So far as I remember, the diary was a pretty spectacular fantasia of adolescent lusts and local hatreds: Dear Katherine, David came ...”

“... range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”

“... Trump replied. “It’s all bullshit.”’ Woodward is repeating himself here, which means he may have got his notes muddled up. What’s more likely is that everyone was just saying the same thing over and over again. Trump wanted to bring the money home, especially from South Korea. In desperation, Cohn asked him emolliently: ‘So, Mr President, what ...”

“... parties on the Continent. The issue today is not how to be social democratic, much as this may agitate the victims of adversary politics. The issue is what comes after Social Democracy ... [It] will have to be an imaginative, unorthodox and distinctive liberalism which combines the common ground with the new horizons of the future of liberty, Unlike ...”

“... have a narrative content, the fantastic pictures almost seem to have been painted in the way we may have to recount the night’s bad dreams over breakfast before we can get on with the day. His antidote to the diable au corps, his path to sublimation, was to dedicate himself to working patiently, sanely, soberly, from nature, a course taken from about 1872 ...”

“... first part). And his medical training, the importance of which he emphasises in the Reflections, may explain why he writes so well about the body, gestures and facial expressions. It is a pity he never wrote about Lavater and physiognomy. These virtues are combined with high theoretical ambition. Like many writers of the Frankfurt School, Elias played Marx ...”

“... Deployment that provides a ready attack option is part of this process. But, however much he may be deplored, it is up to the Iraqis to remove any ruler who abuses them. ‘Pre-emptive defence of world order’ looks a little thin as an explanation for the deployment of so many of our overstretched Armed Forces. Should we look for an explanation from the ...”

“... of a genocide. In reminding us of this Bevan has performed a valuable service, no matter what we may think about a rebuilt Warsaw or a cherished ruin. We have the privilege of wondering whether the fetishism of built objects (the heritage industry) might be a sign of our loss of authentic memory, as it was for Pierre Nora in his monumental survey of the ...”

“... place.’ But this particular passage comes from Mlle de Scudéry’s novel Le Grand Cyrus, which may be ‘thinly veiled’ fiction, but is still, decidedly, fiction. Craveri devotes all too little attention to the difficult questions of early modern French generic conventions, literary style, the meaning of patronage relations for literature, and the effect ...”

“... rightly points out, even if exoplanets turn out to be exponentially plentiful in our galaxy, life may prove to be an even more exponentially improbable occurrence. The easy leap made in the early days of SETI – from stars to planets to life to intelligent life – was never more than a conjecture. So the ‘eerie silence’ – no confirmed SETI contacts ...”

“... the crematorium on order from the firm of J.A. Topf and Sons. Hitler was not present at Wannsee, may not even have known about it. But as Kershaw shows, he did not need to be there. He sanctioned every step of the descent into genocide; his talk was heavy with references to ‘extermination’ and ‘annihilation’, and he could tell SS leaders to come up ...”