“... Within a matter of weeks, Sky’s obnoxious ‘whole new ball game’ has become as familiar as Man United’s new away strip. And meanwhile, the Norway game has come and gone, not to mention the home tie against Turkey and the great San Marino massacre. And Holland will be happening quite soon. With two-thirds of the season gone, a dozen other major ...”

“... the contributors are no sort of Marxist (David Marquand, for example) and two, Michael Rustin and Paul Hirst, are politely but firmly critical of the New Times thesis. It says something about their editorial style that no attempt is made by the editors to answer or even comment on Rustin and Hirst, though their criticisms are very damaging. What is the ...”

“... to terms. Here, Morgan reinforces the critical revisionist work of other Marxist scholars such as Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, particularly the latter’s Class Conflict and Sectarianism (1980). The basic defect in Connolly’s approach was, as David Howell, too, has argued, that it assumed that the idea of an Irish national identity was ...”

“... in 1504, as it was disciplined and enriched by his autodidactic efforts on the epistles of St Paul, some of which lost endeavour may survive as a residue in the Annotationes. Throughout this time, while he was becoming familiar with the Greek text underlying the received Latin version, his aim was not to edit the Greek, but to revise the familiar ...”

“... Richard Kearney’s essay ‘Myth and Terror’, in which he resorts to Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricoeur to understand and, apparently, to pacify the mythic repetitions – of sacrifice, blood and apocalypse – he finds in modern Ireland. There is also much medition on Celtic mythology, the hero, God and Man, and ...”

“... of Barr’s book one needs some idea of what he is attacking. Canonical criticism is not a one-man operation, but its most distinguished theorist, and Barr’s main target, is Brevard S. Childs, a professor at Yale. Barr is Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford and a scholar of immense distinction, so this is not a battle of pygmies. The arguments of Childs ...”

“... will be the ‘men of conscience’ like Zola and Sartre. There is and always will be the just man, one against the rest, resisting the forces of history and its alleged diktats, like Camus and Julien Benda. In a word, it’s like a comedy which, instead of Columbine, Harlequin and Pantaloon, would have a set number of stock figures that have been defined ...”

“... whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time was Hecht’s account of his period as a Zionist activist in the 1940s (this, or at ...”

“... When Captain Paul Voulet presented his plan for a new expedition to the minister of colonies in January 1898 he was accorded a good reception. He was, after all, a promising young officer whose previous mission to French Sudan had shown exemplary firmness towards the natives, and only a few months earlier the president of the republic, Félix Faure, had given him an audience ...”

“... to ‘the elimination of ego’. Concrete poetry, too, treats words and letters as things. Haroldo de Campos, a Brazilian concrete poet, called such art ‘verbivocovisual’ because ‘the materiality of the poem … and its visual appearance’ can’t be separated from what it means. (You could say the same about The Very Hungry Caterpillar, if it weren’t ...”

“... doubt that Volkov’s book is substantially a fabrication. Laurel Fay herself delivered the coup de grâce in a meticulous piece of scholarship published in a collection of largely sceptical essays, A Shostakovich Casebook, edited by Malcolm Hamrick Brown, in 2004. Elizabeth Wilson sides with Fay, while observing with regret that ‘the so-called ...”

“... only Cuban matters but those of all nations came into Castro’s critique, from the insufficient de-Nazification of West Germany to French atrocities in Algeria. In later decades, his speeches would become gruelling national rituals, but almost to the end they remained a reliable point of resistance to US triumphalism.Castro’s exit​ from New York was ...”

“... by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say I’m designing St Paul’s’ (a building which he completed in 1710). Hill’s poem lives locally in these small, self-delighting verbal graces that can have the air of deft contrivance or happy accident, while its more momentous and even ominous compulsions work themselves out ...”

“... of all observers, owner of arguably the best-known entirely plain face in the world, the richest man on the planet: Bill Gates III. According to Cringely, top-level computer jocks are always, without exception, either hippies or nerds; the lank-haired, anal-retentive, oversized-glasses-wearing, non-fantastically-good-at-teeth-brushing Gates is the apotheosis ...”

“... radical heretics? Spinoza was a republican democrat and a supporter of the politician Johan De Witt (1625-72), an opponent of the House of Orange. After De Witt’s death, the aristocratic Orange faction took power and restored a more conventional social order (which was subsequently imposed on Britain when one of ...”