“... the ethics of journalism. Inevitably, he brings up the bloody communist coup in Barcelona in May 1937, and the way two British writers – Cockburn and Orwell – recorded it. Orwell had been wounded fighting with the vaguely Trotskyite POUM militia and found the crushing of non-Stalinist units and the terror used to hunt down their sympathisers ...”

“... claim, from the notorious joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that each individual may “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” should be … stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable for ever after.’Vermeule insisted that a range of political regimes were ...”

“... Act with just five dissenting votes in the House and the Senate.National trade restrictions may be unwise, even cruel, but a government’s ban on its own trade with another country is a legitimate part of statecraft. American embargos are of a different order, since the US is in effect asserting that it is illegal for anyone, anywhere, to deal with ...”

“... interview with Le Figaro, conducted two weeks after 9/11, Rodinson remarked that ‘the temptation may be strong to equate [Islam] to a kind of barbarism. This must obviously be resisted, for Islam is also the winged words of the great Muslim thinkers.’Rodinson begins by describing the world into which Muhammad was born. Rome besieged by ...”

“... There he was free from Willie’s presence, but not from his support.After Oscar’s conviction in May 1895, Willie really let himself go. He fired off a letter to the governor of Pentonville when it was rumoured his brother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but was satisfied with the answer, reporting to Bram Stoker: ‘He is taking his punishment (in ...”

“... Hughes first demonstrated in public at the Royal Society and the Society of Telegraph Engineers in May 1878 had no diaphragm and did not rely exclusively on carbon. More important were the differences in purpose: Hughes’s device had a far broader range of applications than the telephone as an amplifier of sound. Yes, he told the Royal Society, it would ...”

“... against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to ...”

“... of Galileo in 1633 was a symptomatically dismal episode in the life of the mind. Wherever else it may apply, the historian’s ‘crisis of the 17th century’ seems hardly the right phrase here. Shall we say, then, that Rosa got things right first time: that in his style of artistic operation, he truly was ahead of his time? But surely there’s some glitch ...”

“... said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’) Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of ...”

“... and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who embodied conventionally masculine traits, at least in the ...”

“... in driving growth – and thus the need to protect intellectual property in particular – but one may have doubts about whether that’s sufficient reason to claim that after the present moment adequate institutions (economically speaking) can no longer be expected to develop internally. She goes on to argue that China’s approach ...”

“... dilemmas through his all-uniting ‘personage’, although, reading against the grain, the note may also prompt us to think that this is exactly the use he is making of the old man with wrinkled dugs who foresees and foresuffers all. The impressive range of references in Eliot’s notes increased the sense among his initial readers that the poem was the ...”

“... under a government that he expected to be strongly influenced by Islam. Memmi, who died in late May, spent the rest of his life in Paris, in an apartment in the Marais, but he remained preoccupied with the question of the ‘lived experience’ of colonial domination, racism and other forms of oppression. He was especially concerned with the disfiguring ...”

“... further back still, in the dark plans of Apollo, god of light, and the will of Zeus, ‘whoever he may be’, the god who killed and usurped his own father? The play’s riddling language hints at the way one word, phrase, action or body can turn into another, often at a terrible price. The death of Iphigenia becomes the death of Agamemnon. More broadly, in ...”

“... spirituality’ in G.K.’s life. The Sins of G. K. Chesterton suggests that the second reason may have a bearing on the first. It wasn’t money, sex or power that tempted Chesterton, but misplaced loyalty. He took part in a number of nasty instances of journalistic intimidation, not just during the Marconi affair, all of them a result of trailing along ...”