“... personal and creative history (at one point, there is a flashback to the Cuban childhood he may or may not have had). At the heart of the venture was an attempt to communicate: users must find their own way around the CD-Rom, and Marker’s hope was that ‘there should be enough familiar codes here . . . that the ...”

“... ways, uncovering a substratum of India within the white colonialist. Kipling’s mother tongue may have been English, but those other mothers, the native nurses and household servants, had left their mark on him. In Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen recounts a parallel story. Elias Canetti grew up in Bulgaria speaking ...”

“... to be withdrawn from the mainland to try to hold the line in Crete, itself abandoned at the end of May. At the same time, the new Iraqi regime bombed the British base at Habbaniya. The capture of Ethiopia that month, and the return of its emperor, Haile Selassie, was of little consolation. Wavell was now in Churchill’s sights. The last straw was his initial ...”

“... of wheel-clamping in Dublin would suggest that old anti-colonial habits die hard. Tories may not all have been the Zapata figures they have been cracked up to be, but Irish rebellion was not without its aura of romance. Agrarian secret societies such as the Whiteboys, Rightboys, Defenders, Dingers, Black Hens, Blackfeet, Rockites, Shanavests and ...”

“... Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ‘wonderful, comprehensive mind’ which ‘embraced the whole of this powerful empire’. A few years before, Wilkes ...”

“... am a follower of General Fehim . . . and my job is to kill the enemies of Panjshir, whoever they may be. While Karzai and his ministers were hiding safely in America, we fought and died to defeat first the Russians and then the Taliban . . . And if anyone tries to take power from us, I will fight them too, whether it is Americans, Canadians or ...”

“... is alienating many of our people’ at the very time when ‘Jews are afraid of things that may possibly happen in this country to them,’ the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell observed in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in July 1933. The Hollywood Question was now a political matter. Anti-semitic stereotypes were employed by both ...”

“... What is clear is that the mathematics of complexity hovers ghostlike over our every action. We may choose to be its masters or its slaves, but irrespective of our choices, it will continue to weave its logic in the core of our biological and cultural existence. Indeed, if H.G. Wells was right, it may become the agency by ...”

“... late at night. The procedure for the curfew is essentially that individual local authorities may design a curfew scheme which must then be approved by the Home Office. The scheme must last for a maximum of 90 days and must begin no earlier than 9 p.m. and end no later than 6 a.m. The police have the power to escort any child found in breach of a curfew ...”

“... more fascinated by Ireland than the English are, or indeed than the Irish are. These interests may have been latent all along; but it can’t be easy being a meticulously scholarly, politically right-of-centre critic whose current preoccupations happen by a remarkable stroke of ill luck to coincide with those of the post-colonial theoretical trendies one ...”

“... are more than three thousand years old and there are commentators who believe that they may have been written by a woman, a highly placed figure in the court of King Solomon. Jenny Diski’s latest novel is a third-person account of misadventure in Genesis: Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham ...”

“... will now answer the ultimate moral question: what, finally, do we live by? And though the answer may come only in sporadic flashes known as epiphanies, heard between two waves, in the ominous echo of an Indian cave, in the moment in the rose garden or in a sudden shout in the street, it can scarcely be claimed by the more conventionally religious that the ...”

“... lawsuits against P2P sites such as Grokster and Morpheus. The legal basis of the RIAA’s suits may seem shaky, since what they are doing is suing for the closure of websites on the grounds that they distribute software which damages the interests of the music industry. When the video recorder case came before the Supreme Court, it ruled that the video was ...”

“... pages of Cardinal Gasquet and the belligerence of Belloc: ‘Heretics all, whoever you may be,/In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,/You never shall have good words from me./Caritas non conturbat me.’ Duffy could never have written anything as unpleasant as that. But he could have been the target of Robert Browning’s jibe (in ‘Bishop ...”

“... before Christmas in 1925 for ever poisoned that holiday for him. As to any direct influence Anna may have had on her son’s writing, we have only the evidence of the answer she gave a reporter who’d asked her about one of Mencken’s columns: ‘I haven’t read it. I never read anything he writes. That’s his business.’ But we do know that she shared ...”