“... an argument popular in the 1880s but less powerful in the postwar period. He couldn’t forgive David Lloyd George, then prime minister, for negotiating with Irish republicans. ‘The surrender to the murder gang in Ireland is going to have a deplorable and very immediate effect on Palestine, Egypt and India,’ he warned in 1921. Ronan McGreevy’s new ...”

“... the RAF (the French call it Scalp). The Declaration on Defence and Security Co-operation signed by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy at their summit on 2 November specifically anticipates Anglo-French collaboration on ‘an assessment of enhancements to the Scalp/Storm Shadow cruise missiles’ and joint development ‘of the equipment and technologies for the ...”

“... bend it and even invert it, but it’s still information. And this is one of the things Thirlwell means when he says (with a note of disappointment?) that ‘the art of fiction … must be tougher than it looks.’ You can shift a story from Italy to China, and from Beirut to Hebden Bridge – both removals occur in this book – but it’s amazing how much ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... Nobel laureates Steven Weinberg and Kenneth Wilson, and their fellow physicists Jean Bricmont and David Mermin – with a selective group of the targets of their criticism: sociologists and social historians of science rather than, for example, literary or cultural studies theorists. The debate is joined also by a number of natural scientists and others who ...”

“... parts of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses and that some of the psalms were not composed by David … Paine took particular pleasure in some of the Bishop’s curious admissions. For example, The Age of Reason questioned whether God really commanded that all men and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered and their maidens ...”

“... debate and a vote that reflects public opinion may be disappointed. There are several reasons. David Cameron, who is known to be opposed to the measure, has declined to make parliamentary time – i.e. time allocated by the government whips – available for it. This means that Marris will have to run the gauntlet of the ...”

“... ran a tapestry-repair company. The cannibal daughter worked there too. No account of the sculptor David Smith fails to notice his time as a welder on a production line; Bourgeois’s stitching should be thought of in the same way. A skill already learned, waiting to give a flavour of unusual competence to quite different constructions. When, in Seven in a ...”

“... the same, and both are faithful in their way to the Elmore Leonard story where they started, which means the new work also has its share of moral suspense and complexity. I can’t tell the end of the story – not the same in the new movie, though all the ingredients of the old formulation are there – without giving too much away, but the long set-up is ...”

“... date is early 1918, and Trevor’s goal is to end the war that was supposed to end all wars. He means something pragmatic, like saving a certain number of lives. Diana thinks he is at war with war, which is how she sees her mission, and goes with him to England to serve the cause. No one in the movie considers the confusion internal to the idea of fighting ...”

“... the 436 bus, you can hardly see the power station. Viñoly’s plan, filled in on the ground by means of an appallingly cheap, lumbering pair of blocks nominally designed by Frank Gehry, seems to go out of its way to hide the enormous brick building. The same effect is created to the west by a slightly less offensive glass wall designed by Foster’s. The ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... if you know subject X had been buried in a distant city a month before. That report, as given, means something and you can never know what, for sure, until the end of time, if then. The central thing to understand is the primacy of information, properly interpreted. Angleton ran the CIA’s Counterintelligence (CI) staff from 1954 until he resigned, very ...”

“... NFL players do not often fail drugs tests, but that does not mean the sport is clean. It means the people who run the sport are not overconcerned about the players’ underlying health: it would be bad for business. The clearest evidence for this is the brain damage we know is caused to American footballers by the repeated head trauma they ...”

“... channel AMC, credits Evans with mentoring her in her earlier career as a screenwriter. In 2020 David Zaslav, head of the Warner-Discovery conglomerate that includes HBO, bought and renovated Evans’s home in Beverly Hills. Biskind writes that the househad seen its share of drugs, sex and rock’n’roll, had succumbed to weeds, rot and decay, and become a ...”