“... In the process, we see that these two types of material are not so different as they may at first seem. The most striking similarity between the superhero comic and the memoir-in-comics is the motif of ‘double identity’. This is perhaps the defining feature of the superhero. We recognise Superman not by his ability to freeze objects by ...”

“... ways, Ober believes, Athens was the Google of the ancient world. And if this is true, then we may need to reconsider our other reservations about the democratic nature of the wisdom of crowds as well. Perhaps we are wrong to assume that democracy in the modern world can’t be much more than a popularity contest. And if so, perhaps we should also stop ...”

“... turns out that as seen from the private quarters the West Wing barely registers. Of course, that may have been the point of these conversations, which Clinton set up with his old friend Branch (they had been roommates together while working on George McGovern’s disastrous presidential campaign of 1972) in order to record for posterity a real-time overview ...”

“... for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed. The proliferation of newspaper sources on the internet means that this is often the best place to look for new, verifiable source material (particularly if you are not too bothered about truth). Most of the information out there is recent ...”

“... end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and may or may not be read. Kipling is a writer between readerships: no longer anything like as popular as he once was, but not quite unpopular enough to be included in courses on Modernism or The Short Story. His reputation ...”

“... yourself a lot of grief. Displacement activities abound, fuelled by the lingering fear that it may already be too late. What if you write the book and it’s no good, or at least not good enough to rescue your tattered reputation? What if by the time the book comes out the field has moved on? Before you can get going you need to bring your thinking up to ...”

“... to declare a view. This reviewer stands – albeit with some strong reservations – nearer what may be called the Hamilton position than its opposite. Monty did bring a completely new spirit to the Eighth Army when he assumed command. He showed who was master. He imposed his will. Monty did sometimes force sense upon Allied planning, absolutely refusing to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with European and American views and evidence. By attending to very different histories, we may understand our own better. The place to begin seems to be the sheer fact that these literary histories exist. There are no contemporary counterparts in English about English or American literature. We have seen histories of the Elizabethan theatre audience or ...”

“... Admiralty, it depicts him sitting on a bulldog and holding a battleship over the inscription, ‘May God defend the Right.’ One point on which most of these very diverse artists agreed was that the raw material was unpromising. The New Zealander David Low, who became Churchill’s favourite cartoonist, first met him in ...”

“... for example, next to a skeleton in a vitrine, there used to be a replica of Michelangelo’s David, exposing himself, scarlet Y-fronts fashionably dropped, to show a sea cucumber-like penis quite unlike the original. Their numbers have now dwindled to a mere million or so, but forty years ago there were many millions of monks in Siam (as Anderson often ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... theory, stipulates a trade-off between how precisely a quantum object’s position and momentum may be specified. In other words, nothing – not even gluons – can force quarks to sit perfectly still in a fixed location. The more gluons act to keep the new quarks fixed squarely on top of the original one, the more energetically those quarks jump ...”

“... to sanction them. The extraction of equity often means profits now, costs later – and the costs may be borne by someone else, since they accrue to the firm, not to those who appropriate the profits. In developed capitalist countries, this formula has been generating outsize fortunes at the price of outsize misery for the past forty years at ...”

“... he grows older, he becomes more attached to the values of Athens as against those of Sparta: It may seem paradoxical to add that for that very reason my admiration for the spirit and institutions of this country grew incomparably stronger in the years 1939 to 1940, when I suppose the British showed the greatest fidelity in their history to the Spartan ...”