“... declared in one of the best-known passages in the lecture, ‘is making a pact with diabolical powers.’ It doesn’t follow from this that we are all damned; only that no one should get involved with politics if damnation is what primarily concerns them. Förster, Weber said, was a man he could respect ‘because of the undoubted integrity of his ...”

“... my spear.’ This sort of soft porn abuse would not be allowed if Homer Inc had the revocation powers that McDonald’s Corporation exercises from Oak Brook, Illinois over its franchisees in 119 countries – nor would the new Stephen Mitchell translation be allowed. It’s not that I would hazard to challenge the merits of Mitchell’s translation. On ...”

“... job was to protect their lives and property, adjusted rather easily to the expansion of police powers over black Americans. They were mostly unmoved by the argument that drug use and crime among poor blacks were the result of economic deprivation, discrimination and racism, or that society had a responsibility to remedy these problems. The military ...”

“... The following year Lula hosted the BRIC summit in Brazil itself. On paper, the four largest powers outside the Euro-American imperium would appear to represent, if not an alternative, at least some check to its dominion. Yet it is striking that, although Brazil alone of the four is not a major military power, it is so far the only one to have defied the ...”

“... created a National Security Council dominated by the military, which acquired wide-ranging powers. With these institutions in place, the second cycle of postwar Turkish politics was set in motion. As soon as elections were held, it became clear that the voting bloc put together by the Democrats, though at first distributed across a number of successor ...”

“... that transcends ‘the left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his ...”

“... to get back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion in the European Economic Area, in the ...”

“... start work on tests more than a week earlier, but China sat on it.At a press conference in April, Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies chief, revealed that the WHO had first learned of the outbreak not from the Chinese authorities but from ProMED, a non-profit network of observers who scan the internet for disease reports. One of ProMED’s spotters drew the ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in ...”

“... and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who screeches on and on from Berlin doesn’t like the map, and wants to change it so that he has more ...”

“... and hamlets, to … the furthest reach’. Returning, she passes by the Catholic cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula, and (we are now in the past tense) ‘hearing the bell calling the faithful to the evening service, Charlotte Brontë did something strange and entirely uncharacteristic: she followed the worshippers in.’Charlotte wrote to Emily of that ...”

“... There is no mercy for white Westerners who sided with the MPLA. In an encounter in London with Michael Wolfers, an elderly ex-Times journalist who covered Nigeria during the Biafran war and spent years in Luanda with the MPLA as a Marxist aide-de-camp, she sneers at his fatal offer of foie gras, scoffs at the fact that he was privately educated, and goes a ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”