“... that one day will begin to glow so that the spirit takes fire. She takes off her glasses . . . May I? . . . unpins her hair, hurls away her knitting bag, and leaving her employer outraged and weeping, sets off in search of love and life. It’s what always happened to Bette Davis. Why should it not happen to you? MISS PLUNKETT: Because, you verbose fool, I ...”

“... readers of J.E. Lendon’s Soldiers and Ghosts – and their degree of satisfaction with this book may well depend precisely on whether the focus of their interest is historical or literary. For while Lendon teaches history, his approach is literary, and with that comes a large reliance on narrative sources that tell us all kinds of wonderful tales, not on the ...”

“... 20th-century premier. It wasn’t all bad. By the time he had been forced out by Churchill in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best ...”

“... and patience for piecemeal communities to get to the point of being regarded seriously, but that may be on its way. The so-called ‘edge cities’, amalgams of super-sized shopping malls and office plazas that mushroomed sensationally round about 1980 near freeway junctions, are one symptom of that adjustment. Few new edge cities are taking shape ...”

“... to Watts, the Indians to the reservation. Leaving me to be the sole whipping-boy of the man who may have held a Harvard degree, but was a disgrace to it, cruder and meaner . . . than any of the street mobsters that Mr S. ever hosted. Such was the father of our country’s most captivating President. Mr Ambassador, if anyone had the guts to spit in his ...”

“... think more carefully about their choices; that they don’t blindly follow a party allegiance they may well have inherited from their parents. For Mair, though, this is a problematic development. Parties used to be based on distinct social identities. In other words, they truly represented distinct sections of the population. Partisanship didn’t detract ...”

“... So what was the relationship between the Olympians and all these other daemons and divinities who may or may not have had a place on the mountain? The knee-jerk response is that they were the principals in the pantheon. But in what sense was Ares a principal deity? Cults of Ares were neither very widespread nor very ...”

“... It’s May or June​ , the Cam is stuffed with expensive punts, which in turn are stuffed with moneyed tourists. A bunch of under-employed post-examinal students are dementedly heaving and levering away at one of the massive ornamental granite balls crowning the parapet of one of the college bridges. They’ve prised it loose, the entire river – the strollers and dawdlers and smoochers along the Backs, the rest of the shipping – seems to be watching in horror as it’s directly threatening a punt-load of Japanese tourists: the looming atrocity is of diplomatic, hemispheric, intercultural dimensions ...”

“... for world-weary intellectuals to register their protest by taking their own lives. He knows he may be turning a personal crisis into a political challenge, but in a world where the personal and the political are becoming hard to separate, he thinks his death can serve as ‘a signal, a challenge, an appeal’. During the war Mann had attempted to dream a ...”

“... the dark net owes its origins in part to one of the US Defense Department’s research units. (One may be forgiven for thinking that the DoD is keeping afloat most of the theoretical and applied science and engineering departments on both coasts of the US. Apple is often credited with responsibility for game-changing innovations in mobile technology but in ...”

“... it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all ...”

“... of English study in the 20th century’. Haugen’s argument, like many correctives to orthodoxy, may go a little far. The price of embedding Bentley in European traditions of classical scholarship is to downgrade his complex role in English literary culture. Many English responses to Bentley undoubtedly arose from hostility to his ungentlemanly background ...”

“... by Papadopoulou.’ Security on Skios is tight: so tight, in fact, that observant visitors may begin to wonder just what the foundation actually does. What are the boats that come and go in the middle of the night? What’s really in the crates marked ‘marine diesel spares’ that occasionally appear on the jetty? And what’s going on behind those ...”

“... scene is a long lament for the return of the stricken Xerxes. In racial and cultural terms Xerxes may be an ‘other’, but Aeschylus enters into his suffering as fully as he does that of any Greek tragic hero. This extraordinary degree of empathy becomes all the more remarkable when we realise that Aeschylus himself had fought in the major battles against ...”

“... of the Soviet Union was becoming clear, had predicted that change would soon follow in Cuba. ‘It may not be days or weeks or months but it is coming.’ That same year a leading Cuban American journalist, Andres Oppenheimer, published a book entitled Castro’s Final Hour. But the Cuban revolution is both highly institutionalised and considerably more ...”