“... extremely common view: that the Nazis successfully appealed to a defeated and stricken people by means of a uniquely dramatised form of ideology and propaganda. This is the view of Hitler as Pied Piper. It is strongly evoked by the cover of the Stachura volume, which depicts the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg Gate on the night Hitler became ...”

“... cabled back his choice: ‘The British Museum is falling down.’ Not a bad title, by any means, particularly when one recalls that the nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is supposed to have originated in a double entendre about male potency, but very much second-best. This was not the only setback I experienced in connection with the ...”

“... side to stay on top for the whole of a single day’s play, never mind all four or five. This means that no game is ever done until it is done, and no team can ever feel entirely secure about the way things are going. The nerviness, second-guessing and never-say-die heroics that this produces are what give each game its intense drama. This has ...”

“... too natural for art that Wood discerns in the death scene in The Pleasure Garden has found a means other than jesting last words to embed itself in the narrative. Hitchcock, who never forgot what he’d learned as a director of silent films, understood that he didn’t need words at all, jesting or otherwise. For all the light at their disposal, his ...”

“... sense of a different culture at work. Churchill’s War Cabinet and its media outlets were by no means immune to the appeal of good propaganda, as the pages of photographs of getting in the harvest all over England in the autumn of 1940 make perfectly clear. But for some reason there is no urge to represent the lives and faces of the dead, or even to name ...”

“... effort much greater than would be required if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare. When we hear, for instance, that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... whole seem to care, what is being kept from us. That is rather special; and a major factor, claims David Vincent in this path-breaking book, in our governance. It can have ludicrous effects. One was the refusal to acknowledge that we had any ‘secret services’: until recently, MI5 and MI6 had no official existence. Questions about them in Parliament were ...”

“... so far rightwards that it isn’t really the same party any more. In that process of migration, David Blunkett was one of the key players. Blunkett is important not only because of how he behaved when in office – we’ll get to that in a moment – but also because of the journey he took to get there. A man who from 1980 to 1987 was the leader of the ...”

“... tower of refuge, or take his chances out in the open. But first he must pay the blood tax, which means trekking with a purse of 500 groschen, ‘all the money the family had saved, scrimping from week to week and month to month in anticipation of just this day’, to the Kulla of Orosh. The Kulla of Orosh is the ancestral seat of the ruling family that ...”

“... was rendered by Stalin’s linguists as diversiya, Russian for ‘subversion’ or ‘sabotage’. David Reynolds is the author of distinguished works of modern American history, and a master in the art of overcoming wilful or accidental distortions of wartime events and communications. In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War ...”

“... a term regularly applied to extraordinary acts of bravery when we abhor their ends and means. The silliest description of the onslaught on the World Trade Center was the often repeated slogan that it was a ‘cowardly’ attack. Mary Beard Cambridge It has been hard in the past twenty years for Americans to think about the United States and the ...”

“... in Russia, Greece, Poland and Hungary, as well as Taiwan and Iran. The other prominent declinist, David Thomson, wasn’t even convinced of that. The only director in Sontag’s contemporary pantheon who featured in the edition of Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that I owned was the oldest, Theo Angelopoulos, and in his entry Thomson lamented that ...”

“... respect is the intricate and soundly-researched exploration of Irish cultural ‘otherness’ by David Cairns and Shaun Richards in Writing Ireland, although it is clogged in parts by awkward efforts to align its arguments with those of the European masters: Foucault, Lacan, Gramsci and Althusser are all invoked at length in the opening pages, and are ...”

“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”