“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... As General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, prepares to report to Congress on 15 September on the success of George Bush’s ‘surge’, Bush himself is trying hard to talk it up and to discredit the policy of withdrawal. In a speech on 22 August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, he resorted to the new and risky strategy of using the example of the US withdrawal from Vietnam to support his position on Iraq ...”

“... to us at the very height of its 18th-century prosperity, in a period when Toxteth no longer means the ‘old deer park’ of the Normans, and has not yet become the awesome symbol of ‘inner-city’ deprivation. In fact, Toxteth is something sublime – an enclosure of farms whose inhabitants have by their Puritan zeal won for it the appellation of ...”

“... was, among other things, a continuation of the dialogues with Bloch by other and very different means (including some derived from Bloch’s ‘own’ Thomas Münzer). It was provocative in exactly the same sense, and sure enough its publication by Aufbau Verlag in 1952 made it a cause célèbre. Old emnities from the Expressionism debate were ...”

“... to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed – in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.‘The Impermanence of Importance’ would have made a good alternative title for this ...”

“... and none of them would have understood the modern relocation of politics below imagination. David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in Renaissance England is a protest against the devaluation of political verse, and especially of radical political verse. Where Dr Johnson could deplore Milton’s radicalism yet admire his poetry, Eliot and Leavis expelled ...”

“... and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as ...”

“... This is the case even among non-Jewish cartoonists. A particularly striking case is that of David B. (né Pierre-François Beauchard), whose autobiographical L’Ascension du haut mal (1996-2003) is available in a single-volume English translation called Epileptic. The ‘epileptic’ is Pierre-François’s elder brother, Jean-Christophe, and the book ...”

“... of the conflict in the history of relations between Iraq and Kuwait and in the claim, by no means original to Saddam Hussein, that Kuwait historically belongs to Iraq, Cambridge University’s Research Centre for International Law is offering a volume in its International Documents series, which is to be followed shortly by a second on sanctions and ...”

“... because that’s what we know it to be? The answer to all these questions is probably yes, which means that however fascinating literary names are as a subject it’s extremely hard to write a book about them. If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it differently, then it may turn out to be a practice as mysterious as ...”

“... They’ve been found in placentas too.That​ everything is worse in the presence of pollution means that everything should be better in its absence. And, as best we can tell, it is. According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives every year – more than would have been saved last ...”

“... surrounding this issue in the States is strange and quite alarming. Although Republicans are by no means all opposed to abortion on demand, those who are regularly attack it as a ‘liberal’ or a ‘left-wing’ solution. And perceptions of this kind are what is really forcing Bush’s hand, quite apart from his own moral and religious convictions. Next year ...”

“... began to be recorded, though the more recent rulers have commanded more effective technical means. The tragedy is older and deeper than Mr Harbison conceives, and it is not to be reversed simply by going back on 19th-century romanticism. Even ‘depersonalised’ ends of state had no need to wait to be pioneered by ‘19th-century subjectivism’. There ...”

“... Fund, estimates the US subsidy at $83 billion a year. Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat, Ohio) and David Vitter (Republican, Louisiana) have asked Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, to come up with a more authoritative figure. No one to my knowledge has done the equivalent calculation for the countries of continental ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”