“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... idea of absence or of something thwarted is central. And that’s why it is wrong to suggest, as David Matthews does in a recent review of Carpenter’s book, that Britten’s greatness was achieved through his emotional anguish, rather than despite it. To lose the sense that something is missing in Britten’s music – the what-could-have-been and the ...”

“... where they dine with his new colleagues from Brandeis. Sontag has given birth to a son, David. She studies for masters’ degrees in literature and philosophy at Harvard. Herbert Marcuse boards in their house. The tone is one of new maturity in a high-toned world, but there are also floods of tears, feelings of imprisonment, the need to die or ...”

“... Just as the Muslim world was vibrating to the ‘insult’ visited on the Prophet Muhamed (Peace Be Upon Him) by an Anglo-Pakistani fictionist of genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by means of epic romance ...”

“... and governors, or to their children, the gilded youth of Juba who returned from abroad after the peace agreements, almost all ordinary businesses are run by foreigners. The hotels and restaurants lining the Nile are often Kenyan, Ugandan or Ethiopian; the Eritreans control the water-trucking, the Darfuri own most of the shops, and other businesses are owned ...”