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“... misunderstanding – the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the West. The personal element of the tragedy comes not just from the feeling of his own life being wasted (and anyway, much of the poem seems to have been written after the internment was over) but from regret for the years that were wasted before, when diplomacy ...”

“... of everyday customs in today’s ‘risk society’. According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other’) to guide us in our social behaviour. All our impulses, from ...”

“... via printed grammars and dictionaries, men like William Carey in India and Heinrich Schon in West Africa effectively influenced which colonial peoples and cultures became more influential. Moreover, in the process of being reduced to order by translators, clerks and printers, indigenous languages were filtered through European thought-patterns, becoming ...”

“... arrested and thrown off the ship at Aden. He would die soon afterwards in an ambush at the North-West Frontier.So, a nicely damaging early life for Barbara, setting her up for a wrecked adulthood. ‘The roster of [her] boyfriends in the early part of the war … runs comfortably into double figures,’ Taylor tells us. One of those boyfriends was the ...”

“... politics of 18th-century Protestant Dissent – the very spearhead of English radicalism – since Anthony Lincoln’s monograph in 1958. But if British historians are more irreligious than their American counterparts, they are at least less whiggish. Too many American historians look too simplistically at the English Civil War/Revolution for pointers towards ...”

“... Parliamentary behaviour matters. Time and again, on doorsteps and at meetings, especially in the West Midlands and on the South Coast, I was rebuked for the House of Commons bear-garden – not that I myself ever shout or indulge in rudeness and animal noises. In one sense, the charge is unfair, since it is coloured by the broadcasting of Prime Minister’s ...”

“... 29 October 2013I think his legacy in terms of his country will be a strong one.US Ambassador James B. Cunningham on Hamid Karzai, 23 September 2014While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures.President Barack Obama, 15 October 2015When [Afghans] leave, they break the social ...”

“... of proprieties; the wilfully bad execution and recourse to deskilled methods; the spurning of the West End for Shoreditch and Hoxton – all the ‘alternative’ themes and media and sites and forms of attention have been emulsified into a phenomenon on which Tony Blair smiles. Stallabrass follows the tracks of this social monster, which can be identified by ...”

“... of relief I can recall little else about it. Human behaviour that day was more striking. My friend Anthony had wandered further along the bank and missed the wave of excitement. As he came back he saw us intent on our scrutiny and panicked, ran and slipped, tumbling into the mud with flailing arms, his binoculars spinning around his neck like a slingshot. Our ...”

“... idea two decades later, having in the meantime denounced the Officials as pro-British traitors. As Anthony McIntyre, a former Provo, reflected, We, who wanted to kill them – because they argued to go into Stormont, to remain on ceasefire, support the reform of the RUC, uphold the consent principle and dismiss as rejectionist others who disagreed with them ...”

“... foul for sailing. However, Medina Sidonia did not sweep past, spreading all possible sail with the west-north-west breeze on his larboard quarter, making the best of his way up the Channel; nor did he attack Plymouth; he shortened sail, waited for some stragglers, and called a council of war. In the meantime, by dint of very ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... conversion, with the much weaker East German currency being accorded parity with the strong West German mark. The immediate appeal of such a policy to East German voters was obvious, and the proposal was also supported by Brandt. In the longer term, however, as Lafontaine then argued, currency parity would lead to industry becoming uncompetitive in East ...”

“... cartoon called Oumpah-pah, featuring a Flatfoot Indian living in a remote village in the Wild West that was bravely holding out against the palefaces, but struck lucky when they launched their ancient Gaulish version of Oumpah-pah in 1959 in the first issue of the comic Pilote (which, like Mad, was aimed at adults rather than children). Pilote had the ...”

“... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...”