“... might speculate on the castration anxieties which such a passage both carries and conceals. The lay reader might wonder how on earth Inglis persuaded himself that he was eyewitness to the scene. Whereas Inglis’s 15 previous publications sank without a trace, despite his best efforts to boost them (in Cultural Studies he recommends his Cruel Peace as an ...”

“... have written about Beethoven’s heroic middle period – most recently, Scott Burnham, but also Paul Robinson, for whom Fidelio is a relatively uncomplicated enactment of the French Revolution – can see nothing except the triumphalism with which he appears to end these works. If we look a bit more closely at Fidelio, however, keeping its incorporated and ...”

“... island and Geffen’s yacht and Tahiti, his design for tearing up the Chicago Olmsted Park to lay down the Obama Presidential Library, which will host a yoga centre – these things are noticed in the right-wing press and the gutter Twittersphere. They make Obama out to be one more liberal hypocrite; whereas with Trump the almost-avowed corruption adds to ...”

“... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...”

“... and each in his own way tries to deal with. Unlike the novel, however (and like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom!), the movie gives the characters not just sentiments and opinions but philosophies of life. These mostly unschooled, regionally accented, often ungrammatical and inconsistent philosophies, which some critics snobbishly belittle, are ...”

“... that case with respect to the development of nuclear weapons. Indeed the subject seems designed to lay bare the contradictions at the core of Enlightenment culture by revealing them at work in the subculture of professional physicists bent to the needs of government power. Few social laboratories could more clearly reveal the tensions between chauvinist ...”

“... For Israel it is the risky and raucous radicalism of the 17th century which, by helping to ‘lay the foundations of the modern world on the basis of equality, democracy, secular values and universality’, has put an end both to ‘religious dominance over education’ and to ‘man’s dominance over woman’. Some of us might put our money on rather ...”

“... Dryden’s long-proposed heroic poem, an altogether opposite sense of the poet has been voiced. Paul Hammond’s John Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was ...”

“... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...”

“... ideas about nonsense],it became clear that one central point of resemblance between them lay in their willingness to characterise discourse about God as nonsensical – more specifically their willingness to take as a touchstone of theological insight the awareness that language was essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of ...”

“... so I’ve decided to stop being one. After a while we got his new business card: Lanchester Jean-Paul Monet. You’re getting more French, we said, but you can’t speak French. I’m working on it, he said: the key lifestyle decision is the name change. You have to call me ‘Lanchester’ now. What with work, Arthur, the gym, the shooting classes and ...”

“... wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room with the plainest of furnishings.The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The ...”

“... to or are cowed by them.Close to the end of White Skin, Black Fuel, Malm and the collective lay out a helpful taxonomy of denial: if outright denial is currently a fringe position, many of us – and more so our governments – live in a state of ‘implicatory denial’. The CEO of Norway’s state-owned oil company has declared Norwegian oil ‘the ...”

“... five years had seen the Commodore recordings of Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and a year ahead lay Gillespie’s ‘Groovin’ High’ and ‘Dizzy Atmosphere’. In the same way, an affecting review of Shoeshine, in 1947, turns in its second part to lament that, after a promising start in this film and Open City and Paisan, the new spirit of the Italian ...”

“... a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s modern rulers: the French, who between 1920 and 1946 cleared acres of labyrinthine quarters to make room for cannon and tanks to control the natives; the few elected and many military regimes who succeeded them; and, latterly, the Baath ...”