“... the troublesome ‘mad Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ Harris reported, ‘a ...”

“... in the mouth. The town square is deserted; the tall-spired church a hulk. There is a cramped little beer-cellar full of gaming machines, but it is decidedly not the old ‘inn’ which stood on the square in the days when Sobeslav was a staging-post between Prague and the southern stronghold of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family. It was ...”

“... Desdemona’s handkerchief. The peculiar vigour of youthful blood is remembered in Dracula, when Arthur Holmwood agrees with Dr Seward that the latter should offer a transfusion of his own blood to the ailing Lucy, ‘as he is the more young and strong’. Othello is far from the only play or poem of the period to contain references to mummy. In The Merry ...”

“... In 1949 he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the ...”

“... of Burnt Norton, which he used as the title for the first of his Four Quartets. He visited the little-known manor house in the Cotswolds in 1934 (a year after he had returned from being Norton professor at Harvard) and heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of ...”

“... He walked the corridors mournfully, muttering: ‘I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.’ Racial condescension aside, he meant what he said, and during the days following the test his secretary said he looked as though he were thinking: ‘Oh God, what have we done!’He was a brilliant physicist, a charismatic leader and a skilful ...”

“... butcher that a fluid would flow down her leg and mix with the sawdust on the floor, a process the little boy beside her would observe with fascination. Other tropes include sessions during which he photographs his bodily wastes, which he’s been saving up for the occasion; cottaging, during which he’s beaten up and repeatedly violated; and a concluding ...”

“... of lectures given at the Jonathan Institute in Washington by George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Arthur Goldberg, Moshe Arens, Eugene Rostow, Paul Johnson, Senator Cranston and many others with similar views. The blurb describes the book as a polemic, which it is, and ‘a comprehensive reasoned analysis’, which it is not. The thesis is that terrorism is ...”

“... companies mattered even in the 1960s, but the conservatively run corporations of that period had little difficulty achieving high ratings. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, corporations started to issue more and more bonds and take on increasing amounts of other forms of debt: Enron was far from alone in this. The debt funded necessary investment, but it also ...”

“... else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is still hankering for a world in which evil is vanquished and all the mistakes of the past ...”

“... père died of a heart attack at the breakfast table while reading the Manchester Guardian. The little Canettis had loved England, and with their father’s help had joyfully learnt its language: relatives rolled about laughing when Elias recited a French story he had learnt at school with a strong British accent. The father, a gentle, civilised man, hoped ...”

“... as ‘wynde’. But these are the opening, not the closing lines of Amiens’s little piece and (more important) the piece is a song, whereas both the Browning poems are for the speaking voice. Moreover, we shall seldom recite either poem and in silent reading asymmetry will register willy-nilly to the eye: for the point is not how we speak ...”

“... into the civil service. In the other faculties, principally philosophy and the sciences, there was little discrepancy. Among non-Jews, there was a considerable tendency to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, whether into the public service (civil or military) or law or medicine. What is significant about the Jewish sample is the much greater proportion of ...”

“... his struggle as Postmaster-General to have stamps issued without the Queen’s head, occupies no little part of these diaries, and in both cases Benn argues that, though the issues were small, they provide a chilling insight into the machinations of the Establishment and the dense and pervasive network which operates in this country to throttle democratic ...”

“... historiography or jurisprudence. He is joined in this appeal by philosophers of physics like Arthur Fine, who asks us to abandon the assumption that natural science ‘is special, and that scientific thinking is unlike any other’. Putnam and Fine both ridicule the idea that the discourse of physics is somehow more in touch with reality than any other ...”