“... And that it                              may choose its                              spot sofreely, from which to scan, and, without more than the wintry beguiling                              wingstrokes seeding                              the fields of ...”

“... by the magnificence of a great European metropolis – still mostly intact when he arrived in May 1943. Working in a vast factory producing brakes and machine guns, Leo acquired Ukrainian girlfriends (the city was crowded with forced or slave labour imported above all from Eastern Europe). But the cultural splendour that awed him was about to ...”

“... are housed together, six or eight to a claustrophobic cabin, yet they are chronically lonely. They may love the adventure of going to sea, but their everyday work is tedious and backbreaking. They pride themselves on their professionalism, and can’t wait to retire. Seamen are notorious for their portside debauchery, even as most of them long for their ...”

“... stomach as Wollstonecraft’s attribution of all such claims and arguments to a divine being. She may have stopped attending church in her twenties, but she never lost her belief in God; her religion was, in Godwin’s words, ‘almost entirely of her own creation. But she was not on that account less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what ...”

“... fears of nuclear war, there is barely a mention of the influence that US domestic politics may have had on the course of events. Theodore Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as ...”

“... a girl improver. Instead, there’s this:Competitive chess is a different story. One basic reason may be that a woman’s time tends to be cut into more. But mainly it’s just fashion and tradition. Young girls generally just don’t study chess seriously, as many boys do. The very few who do so have considerable success.A pocket book on chess isn’t the ...”

“... of British agriculture today. The worst has not been and gone. It is yet to come. Still, one thing may already be clear: British farming hanged itself on the expectation of plenty.One day not long ago I was in the Sainsbury’s superstore on the Cromwell Road. Three of the company’s top brass ushered me down the aisles, pointing here, gasping there, each of ...”

“... order to get elected. Once in the White House, he will be himself again.’ I’m not so sure. It may well turn out that these things have a surprisingly strong grip on his mental ...”

“... what to make of the plate on page 69, ‘Fragment of leaf torn from the Sunday Times Magazine, 20 May 1973 (p.81)’? I mention it not so much in a nit-picking spirit (in fact it was p.74) as out of direct personal interest in a page so grievously tattered that the headline reads: ‘artime ances a trend flourished’. Originally (though Harrison and Daniels ...”

“... is appalled: where, it asks, is our victorious army? The people of Sderot are angry. The Qassams may have stopped, but that was supposed to happen after the army entered Gaza and wiped it out. The ceasefire is ‘fragile’, Ehud Olmert says: it can come to an end any minute. And Ehud Barak, who pushed for it, has an excuse: we have to go through the motions ...”

“... the site of what is now Mexico City. When Cortés arrived in November 1519 the island population may have numbered as many as 200,000. The city was rich, supplied with staples from surrounding territories and luxuries from more distant provinces: bird skins and feathers, cacao, cochineal, live eagles, salt, seashells, jaguar and deer ...”

“... to one colleague, her attitude was ‘when are these idiots going to clear this up?’ – she may have understood how weak her case was. She hadn’t published anything in 2007 or 2008, and her last paper was co-signed not only by her husband but by three of their four children, none of them older than 18. That article appeared in the International ...”

“... picture was laid on top of earlier, thinner detail: even what appear to be the truest of accounts may need a helping hand.* The objective uninflected style of the oil sketch could be taken only so far. Pass on through the exhibition and you find two things happening to out-of-doors painting. The early pictures suggest that open-air sketching took place after ...”

“... of call still New Orleans.’ One answer to the question about the film’s lingering pace may be that Herzog really wanted to linger. He wanted to suspend Cage’s dreamy, manic or tormented face in front of us for so long it would become a landscape and a story in itself – and allow cineastes to get Harvey Keitel out of their minds. It’s an ...”

“... First Deaf Anarcho-Landlord’, had finally installed some beer. 9. And while we may have toppled pylons, scuppered goods trains, marched and thrown neat Hamburg cobbles, occupied whole blocks of houses, what I think of’s more the drone of internecine mock-symposia, of splinter groups and endless blame; weekends lost to tossed-back ...”