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“... published in 1988, when he showed the historian rising above the philosophe pursuit of general laws to write narratives of true historical complexity; I find this reinforced by Gibbon’s early Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which advocates an ironic pursuit of the unexpectedness of human behaviour. The trinitarian Athanasius – a villain figure ...”

“... attire – has once again mutated. For the inquisitors in 1430-31, cross-dressing contravened the laws of nature and of God and fuelled the most ferociously pursued accusations against her; during many centuries of her subsequent cult, artists overlooked this guise and depicted Joan with long flowing hair, while her armour was moulded to a womanly body and ...”

“... such as Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, as well as theoreticians like Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, even claimed that a genuine consideration of US interests militated against the war. The mere fact that some politicians misused or abused the principle of national security need not call that principle into question. But when an idea routinely ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... is a for-profit run by a military contractor, Caliburn International. The anti-immigrant zealot John Kelly – once considered the only ‘adult’ in the White House when he was chief of staff – joined Caliburn’s board immediately after leaving government.*In a televised interview with Vice President Pence, the host reads from an article about the ...”

“... concept was revealed to the world, years later, as the Millennium Dome. But, like his namesake Dr John, the Elizabethan magus and imperial geographer, Simon Dee was exploited by the Secret State and then abandoned to provincial obscurity. Now it can be told: the Dome represents the consciousness of the lost years of Simon Dee. Finally, on Friday 12 ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... traced from Coleridge through writers as different as Charlotte Brontë, whose cold missionary St John Rivers is plainly Evangelical; through Dickens’s Chadband, insisting on telling the ‘Terewth’; through Samuel Butler’s Pontifex and right up to the present moment, where David Hare’s Racing Demon (a tragedy of the Church) has two Judases, one a ...”

“... but as long as mother lives I shall go every year.’ Beckett’s mother disapproved of her in-laws, the Sinclairs, as much as she would have disapproved of the Joyces, had she heard much about them. Beckett, however, was closely involved with both families: they offered him a way out of his own family; they opened paths for him towards certain freedoms ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... of irreversibility, nonlinearity and even discontinuity, but they cannot serve as scientific laws, as Marx and especially Engels thought. By contrast, the opposition between local and global rationality remains of fundamental importance. One might argue, of course, that this idea has by now become so thoroughly absorbed into mainstream social science ...”

“... system helps rather than hinders economic growth on the neo-liberal model, by ensuring that labour laws, trade unions, the legislature, the judiciary and the fear of environmental destruction do not impede the privatisation of state assets, the appropriation of agricultural land, the provision of subsidies and tax cuts to businessmen, or the concentration of ...”

“... demilitarised airport at Heathrow, and making her own way with her small belongings to her in-laws’ flat in South Kensington, on the first floor of a mansion block between several bomb sites. It was 1945, and supplies were thin: my grandmother lay in her bed to keep warm under her crimpled eiderdown, longing for sweets (and other stimulants). Emilia ...”