“... desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged ...”

“... first time in this country, when Rayner Heppenstall, together with his daughter, translated his major works into English and published a short study of him. That modest volume served Roussel’s cause far better than will the present translation of Foucault’s dispiritingly portentous essay of 1963, a lugubrious introduction to Roussel’s essentially ...”

“... Critical Biography’, felt duty-bound to include sustained discussions of ‘all of Swift’s major works and of many of his minor ones’. Alan Downie’s Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (1984) did much the same, its author believing that ‘the explanation of Swift’s worldview’ was the biographer’s business, and that this involved examining the ...”

“... enthusiasm of the progressive intelligentsia. Religious buildings were always fair game. The first major church was destroyed in 1929 and in the Thirties the destruction of churches, monasteries and cathedrals reached a frenzy. Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, predicted a wave of anti-semitism: it was suppressed then, but encouraged after the war, though Kaganovich ...”

“... USA’, ‘The Promised Land’, ‘The River’, ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’ – flight is a major trope, a desperate pedal-to-the-metal attempt to salvage meaning from a collapsing world, where motion is the only answer to a stalled life. The restlessness of Springsteen’s characters reflected his own metabolism. ‘I was not at ease, and to be at ...”

“... lived separate from them in the house of their guardian, but was faithfully kept in touch with by John: who here writes cheerfully promising to get his sister anything she would like, barring ‘livestock’ – always better and more kindly left in its natural environment: – though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of gold-fish ...”

“... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...”

“... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...”

“... century, but by the Arab invasions of the Mediterranean in the seventh. A Belgian, whose first major work was a history of his native country, Pirenne saw the maritime commerce of the Mediterranean as the key determinant of ancient civilisation. Because, in his view, it survived the Germanic invasions, the barbarian kings of sixth-century Europe were able ...”

“... to his habit of changing mistresses every ten years or so; to the fact that he was the first major artist whose rise to a position of importance coincided with a revolution in the dissemination of reproductions; above all, perhaps, to his photogenic qualities. The squat, powerful figure, feet planted firmly in the sand, bare torso gleaming, bright eyes ...”

“... Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains about that? 4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed ...”

“... Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest against the ‘cult of homosexual superiority’, a volley probably directed at the Surrealist Charles Henri ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”

“... studies to bear on the novel.Where did this current spring from? Since three of Derrida’s major works appeared in 1967, an obvious answer would be the political turmoil of the late 1960s, in which – unusually for such mass protests – the function of academic knowledge and the fate of the humanities were among the issues at stake. For the most ...”

“... by both Houses of Parliament warned that unless significant work is carried out swiftly, major, irreversible damage may be done to the Palace. Since then, things have deteriorated: 50 per cent of the Palace’s mechanical and electrical services are at high risk of failure by 2020. The report echoed the call made in 1828 by ...”