“... having done these things, how long it will take to get back home. The trip, in either direction, may take thirty minutes or four hours, or the route may be categorically shut off by soldiers with their loaded submachine guns. The Israeli Government claims that it is obliged to take these measures to combat terrorism. The ...”

“... newborn’s dead mother that might make them hesitate over its ‘sacrifice’? These questions may seem entirely unfair to McMahan, whose purpose is not to produce a gripping and gritty exercise in literary realism, but rather to make a theoretical point – indeed, a point against his own theory that my questions simply underline. Certain possible ...”

“... in the argument about excuses, it mixes high theory and daily practice. It’s true that we may not be able to make a final decision, or any decision at all in the abstract, but we can’t understand the sentences in the abstract either. The fine point of deconstruction is not that we can’t decide but that we have to keep deciding. In Yeats’s ...”

“... remained Communist China’s great enemy; France, traumatised after defeat at Dien Bien Phu that May, had little to offer. But Britain, unlike the Americans, had recognised the new Chinese regime and had played a leading part in securing the Geneva Accords. It was, as Patrick Wright puts it, ‘one of the last occasions, only two years before the Suez ...”

“... and targeting residents in border areas’. An additional clause noted that ‘other matters as may be requested shall be addressed,’ a reference to private commitments by Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause. During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet ...”

“... On​ 31 May 1578, vineyard workers on the Via Salaria in Rome found a tunnel which led them to an early Christian burial site. They had opened the catacombs: the vast network of passages cut through the volcanic tuff outside Rome in which thousands of Christians, as well as Jews and pagans, were buried. The vineyard workers were not the first to spelunk in these artificial caves ...”

“... a double volume containing Hesperides and His Noble Numbers or Pious Pieces. The publication may have been a way of supplementing his drastically reduced income: if he presented copies to those praised within it he might expect a little something in return. After 1648 Herrick printed only one further poem. So Hesperides did amount to, as it said on the ...”

“... look like ‘an Englishwoman of some privilege’ when she’s actually nothing of the kind. She may not be English, but when you’ve been to certain schools and universities, mixed and holidayed with and married certain people, lived and worked (or not worked) in certain places, it’s not clear what advantages you can be said to have missed out ...”

“... open a new way of living, a new way of thinking about the world? A sage and treasure Jane Schwartz may well be, but really, outplacement counselling is pretty much just another consoling fiction. Personality makeovers and sense of humour transplants can’t do much about a shrinking jobs market, which may be one reason ...”

“... fallen apart. Beyond that experience of obliteration, temporary or final, Davies’s chosen places may seem at first sight to have little in common. Their dates range from the Roman period to the 20th century. Some, like Byzantium, endured for a thousand years, while Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia’s independence lasted for less than two days. Some were gigantic in ...”

“... terms of the degree to which they identify with Britain, or share a common set of values). Some may think this argument has more force, but again, his conclusions far outrun the facts. I’ll start with the economics. Goodhart gives a fair summary of the current consensus about the effects of immigration on the labour market. It comes in two ...”

“... married him less than a year later. The instinct to court an ‘enemy’ rather than an admirer may have been a shrewd one: it seems to have been especially difficult for Bowles’s admirers to do her justice. Once greeted with hostility and bemusement, her writing has now been rescued several times over: Everything Is Nice gathers most of her published ...”

“... for the cinema. The organisation’s determination to recruit from all political parties, too, may have done more to obscure than to bridge real ideological divides. Too quick to be satisfied with formal professions of faith, the LNU was slow to acknowledge the conditions and caveats party leaders put on their support. Only when the Chamberlain government ...”

“... justice: a defendant is either innocent or guilty. And it follows from this approach – which may be wholly appropriate in an apolitical context, where the future of a society doesn’t hang in the balance – that perpetrators who are found guilty will be punished and denied a life in the new political order. This can be a dangerous outcome, as South ...”

“... long since drawn a single general conclusion: we’re all being watched, all the time. You may also think this is something we sort of knew anyway. Perhaps you see ubiquitous spying as a function of the post-9/11 authoritarian state, which gathers knowledge by any means possible in order to consolidate its control, and which sees us all as potential ...”