“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All traditional cultures ...”

“... once the Santa Clara Valley. We now seem to sit not at the head of the Salinas Valley but at the foot of the Valley of Silicon.’ Agricultural land worth $18,000 an acre is steadily being converted into building land worth anywhere from $55,000 to $110,000 an acre. And gleaming in the eye of every booster in town is the utopia promised by the powerful ...”

“... is itself tangled: clearly he is describing a 17th-century version of shooting oneself in the foot, but equally clearly the Tartars are not to be imagined as shooting themselves, but as shooting their enemies while appearing to flee, whereas in the case of language it is those who use it who are hit. Hill’s argument is that, since ‘even the most ...”

“... he spent eight months in a French military prison in Algiers, returned to France, then escaped on foot across the Pyrenees, joined the Free French forces in England and landed in Normandy just as his elegant first wife was being ‘dragged from her plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive’ at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was ...”

“... Rutherford Robertson reminds us in his eloquent foreword, Parkinson was the first artist to set foot on Australian soil – a series of appraisals of different aspects of Parkinson’s work by 11 leading scholars has been brought between two covers, accompanied by a magnificent selection of his drawings and by authoritative notes recounting the often ...”

“... select, breasts – elbows,      what else is allowed by the vebal smash-up piled under foot. Crush tread trample distinguish put your choice in the hands of the town clerk, the army stuffing its drum. Rubbish is    pertinent; essential; the    most intricate presence in    our entire culture; the ultimate sexual point of the whole ...”

“... gainful employment elsewhere, but preferred to match themselves against the succession of 700-foot dunes. He well knew that blood feuds raged among the tribes, and says that if anyone had killed one of his companions he would unquestionably have sought to avenge him: ‘I have no belief in the “sanctity” of life.’ Soon the oil men came to desecrate ...”

“... house creaking under the wind assaults. I straightened my legs, so the blanket ebbed and my right foot rose out of the sludge of darkness like a squat, extinguished lighthouse. The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence. Usually the writing’s a bit calmer. Hemon’s sense of humour generally comes to the rescue ...”

“... see them reproduced in a study of Balthus’s work.Alice shows a woman precariously posed with one foot raised on a chair, carefully combing her hair, careless of a breast that has escaped from her shift and of her genital area visible below it. For Sabine Rewald, writing in the excellent catalogue of the 1984 exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New ...”

“... King Arthur) to Æthelred (Æthelstan’s great-nephew), omitting Æthelstan entirely. When Eric John surveyed the tenth century for The Anglo-Saxons (1982), he focused on Edgar, Æthelstan’s nephew. Since then, attention has shifted to Alfred’s achievements, and those of his son Edward the Elder, with Michael Wood alone making the case for ...”

“... Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine ...”

“... frightened, distressed, and with a story about missing time. They sensed something strange at the foot of the bed, they saw something strange at the side of the road – then it’s two hours later and they are in the wrong place with no idea how they got there. They are heading south on the wrong highway and the tank is still full of gas. They wake with the ...”

“... cue like a club. If you are right-handed, the right leg will take the strain as you bend. The left foot should point in the direction of your shot. Keeping as low as possible reduces the possibility of movement. The cue arm should glide freely back and forth, rather like a pendulum, but only the forearm should move; the bridge-hand is spread rigid on the cloth ...”

“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”