“... chief superintendent of the Belgian police, are increasingly popular among European states. They may find it hard to agree about much when it comes to their own continent, but on North African territory intra-EU co-operation is all the rage. Last year the Italian parliament voted to divert a battalion from the Middle East to Niger; Germany has sent a ...”

“... and Russia in particular. The US National Defence Strategy 2018 notes the threat that competitors may use tactics short of open war to achieve their ends, including ‘information warfare, ambiguous or denied proxy operations and subversion’. The most recent report of the US National Defence Strategy Commission describes ‘the growing prevalence of ...”

“... in it. As the archbishop tells Henry V, ‘many things, having full reference/To one consent, may work contrariously.’ So although consent can mean ‘feeling together’ (Latin con-sentire), or even (from Middle French) ‘complicity’, it can also be the truce-line of conflict. Singular and inward, it requires another party if it is to be more than ...”

“... The only reason​ Werner Herzog hasn’t yet made a film about the Ancient Mariner may be that, having already inadvertently incorporated so many elements of the poem into his own work, he has become him. Herzog certainly shares Coleridge’s interest in the physical and spiritual toll taken by epic voyages into uncharted waters ...”

“... shrewd,’ warns a certain Dr Johnson. ‘Be not deceiv’d by any level of the Exotick they may present you, Kilts, Bag-Pipes sort of thing. Haggis. You must keep eternal Vigilance.’ Mason considers himself warned.But what actually happens in it? Well. Dixon is a rollicking country lad, a Quaker from County Durham (‘Why, aye!’). He’s ...”

“... per cent of all users who play a game will never monetise.’ If your game is popular enough, that may still mean hundreds of thousands of players spending within it. Attracting potential spenders is therefore a vital part of what people in the business unromantically call ‘user acquisition’. Many of them, like me, will spend only small sums, and only once ...”

“... isn’t much a woman can safely do to abort herself. So the question asked is what a third party may do.’ By third parties, Thomson meant abortionists. In her essay Thomson compared the situation of a woman or girl pregnant against her will to being kidnapped by a group of music lovers and having a famous violinist’s ‘circulatory system … plugged ...”

“... only a language as outdated as Fanon’s will do.Impeccable Frenchman though he may have been, the French were never prepared to take Fanon seriously. An Antillais, a psychiatre not a psychanalyste, a non-philosopher in thrall to a simplified existentialism, an alien unable to sympathise with the double bind of Algérie française. (‘The ...”

“... for a moment the infirmities of old age. Ageing can blur the lines of sexual difference – this may have been part of the comedy – but I have to say that these masks (and others like them from Sparta) look female to me. Maybe in the rite physical decrepitude and being old-womanish went together. And this possibility is all the more ...”

“... a few ironies. Until the fatwah issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini (a fatwah, we learn, that may be non-rescindable in consequence of his death) anyone who disliked or resented Muslim immigrants in Britain axiomatically disliked Salman Rushdie, who was and is one of their stoutest defenders. Until the fatwah, the secular Left had been reconsidering some ...”

“... and his ingenious use of the materials to hand make the book something of a tour de force. He may at times overreach himself in his desire to overturn the conventional ‘wisdom’, and not all his claims will withstand critical scrutiny, but these are comparatively small flaws which scarcely detract from the magnitude of his accomplishment. Foucault is ...”

“... no English prose writer since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of demolition. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1928, he ...”

“... the interstate highway system and warned about the growth of the military-industrial complex. It may be rash to invite such bold comparisons.The jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them ...”

“... workers, impoverished miners, people who are less concerned with the idea that their nation-state may have become a job-lot than they are with physical safety, food and livelihood, all of which Executive Outcomes has reinstated for tens of thousands of non-combatants in Africa. Yet no one would disagree that it is first and last a mercenary force, however ...”

“... institution once held her in his hands, made casts of her body, and articulated her skeleton. They may be intended as evidence, but they look more like trophies; either way, they are invitations to work backwards, to find out what the child’s life was, and how, in death, she came to be here.She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian ...”