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“... in this context is the ability to detect subtle changes of attitude on the other side, small cracks in the wall of Arab hostility surrounding Israel which might provide an opening for accommodation and peace. As Yehoshafat Harkabi, the outspokenly dovish former head of military intelligence, observed, ‘knowing your enemy’ must include the ...”

“... culture’s relations with power. McGann’s manner has none of the sprezzatura of California’s Stephen Greenblatt, based on an entertaining gift for anecdote and ‘off-the-wall’ parallels from other places and times. Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style ...”

“... 15 billion light-years across, and hardly anybody in it at all, except on the surface of a small planet near the edge of an inconsequential galaxy – and some of them were hairdressers.The faith in a populated universe is an old one. Lucretius introduced the notion of panspermia – the interplanetary diffusion of life by means of germs carried by ...”

“... I always saw those bull-necked fat pigs – like Georg Grosz’s pictures – attacking the small, childlike Vietnamese.’ This was a sort of ‘anti-racist’ response. Another American says: ‘Ours was the sane response. One of total outrage. Not to be outraged was more insane than to be outraged and go bananas.’ This reckless willingness to go ...”

“... two of the city’s homeless street boys who are also chance witnesses to the violence. Certain small details echo, rather inconsequentially, through the three sections: each begins with a reference to colour; a cat, killed by the gangsters, is later discovered by the street boys, who also puncture the tyres on the car driven by Rosa’s husband. But what ...”

“... expression of this view occurred in a recent letter to the London Review of Books. Its writer, Mr Stephen Logan, elegantly transforms Eliot’s parenthetic observation that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’ into a pronouncement that intelligence is ‘largely a matter of perceiving the disabling restrictions of method’. I doubt whether ...”

“... be able to control the content of the canon is merely an extension of this error: it is only a small step from the belief that criticism should treat literature as if it were reducible to a single set of ideas to the phantasy that someone could actually make it so. Conspiracy-theory thinking assumes that the world is exceptionally well-organised and ...”

“... Poirierian nihilism; Poirier’s rigorous writing off (of) the self sends me back, by recoil, to Stephen Whicher’s simplified but accurate three-stage model for Emerson’s spiritual career: transcendental self-reliance; sceptical experience; nihilistic fate and power. True, the three phases mix and mingle at every moment, but the tendency is as Whicher ...”

“... an awkward triangle (first time as romance comedy, second time as painful farce) with his friends Stephen and Natasha Spender, he proposed marriage almost simultaneously to three different women. Women fought over his remains, his private secretary unsuccessfully contesting the will he had changed so often. The title of his final novel, Playback, could be ...”

“... they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a terrific ode to screeching – as well as a generous social history – and it lobs a multicoloured grenade into the ...”

“... McChrystal, or the rules of engagement he applied in Afghanistan. His preference for deploying small covert teams away from prying eyes clashed with the expansive boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency operations that could be scrutinised by reporters, Pentagon higher-ups, politicians and Nato allies. McChrystal’s methods weren’t popular with the people ...”

“... from different religious backgrounds, and when, oh when will she get her period? Margaret joins a small band of girls at school called the Pre-Teen Sensations, who promise to tell each other everything about menstruation, just as soon as it occurs – this enables Blume to describe it from a girl’s-eye (rather than doctor’s-eye or ...”

“... the greater the resentment against landlords and their renting and leasing policies. At Kirkby Stephen the main grievance seems to have been London’s inexplicable abolition of the annual St Luke’s Day holiday, putting paid to the local fair which went with it. There was a kind of climax in the siege of Pontefract Castle, one of the few defensible ...”

“... set of radiating spikes which can easily be confused with normal tissues. Microcalcifications are small flecks of calcium salts, highly opaque to X-rays, which are deposited in the breast either as part of a normal process of change or as a consequence of cancer; sometimes it is possible to classify them as benign or malignant from their appearance on the ...”

“... they describe, and the ones I could find in a preliminary comparison with the old text, are quite small; but the patience and the care (and the good sense) with which they are arrived at are exemplary, and 9000 instances of anything will make a difference. An ampersand is different from the word ‘and’, it matters how far a line is indented, and ...”