“... time for the ‘civil war within the civil war’, the Communist assault on the city’s anarchist-held telephone exchange. Soon afterwards, the POUM was banned and its leader, Andrés Nin, murdered. As soon as Orwell returned, he noticed that Barcelona had changed: it no longer seemed to be a city controlled by its workers: private cars were back on the ...”

“... filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a ...”

“... crashing at high speeds. Nader began to pursue the idea that automobile manufacturers could be held liable for unsafe design. Moving to Washington in 1963, he took a job as a part-time consultant for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assistant secretary of labour, who assigned him to prepare a report on car safety. The result was Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), a ...”

“... which jumped around all over the place when he talked – which was a great deal of the time’. David Gascoyne described in his journal in 1936 how Jennings dominated a meeting of the English Surrealists, ‘as usual … boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... UN Resolutions in the pursuit of their own hostile and destructive policies in those worlds. As David Hirst has pointed out in the Guardian, even Arabs who oppose their own despotic regimes will see any US attack on Iraq as an ‘act of aggression aimed not just at Iraq, but at the whole Arab world; and what will make it supremely intolerable is that it ...”

“... efforts to organise the American premiere of Boulez’s Second Sonata – performed by the pianist David Tudor, who would premiere 4’33” – but relations between the two composers began to deteriorate as Cage’s obsession with using chance in composition proved incompatible with Boulez’s insistence that every parameter in a piece had to be carefully ...”

“... various modern scholars and writers, makes an impressive list. The best place to start – as David Stuttard does in his new biography – is family background. For all its democratic politics, Athenian society was intensely class-conscious. Although Alcibiades was a product of that complex network of upper-crust intermarried families which produced most ...”

“... charge might be generated without external stimulation. Some thinkers, even some scientists, held that there could be no natural explanation for the human mind. The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace argued that evolution could never make a human mind – even though he was a strong supporter of evolution. He came to his conclusion after attending ...”

“... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...”

“... and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century later, neither the church nor classics held much sway over scientific debate. Marine fossils found in the stones of the pyramids could no longer be explained away as remnants of the Flood; they were monuments of geological time that extended far beyond the records of ancient civilisations. The French ...”

“... memories of living together were being effaced, and the fabric of social life, which had held Muslims, Croats and Serbs together, was being torn apart. At no point in the trial did any of the witnesses articulate such a panoramic point of view, though one can feel the judges searching for it when they hold a witness briefly at the end of his ...”

“... controversy by whose lurid light his subsequent work was prejudged and has been judged ever since. David Womersley – now Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford – stands at the head of those scholars who try to situate Gibbon in his 18th-century context, thus raising and trying to answer many questions, of which that just framed is central to the ...”

“... the Black Dwarf.’ We had a vote, and everyone was in favour, which was rare – I think even David Mercer, who was the most grumpy attendant at these meetings. So that’s how it happened, and we raised money for a broadsheet, the first broadsheet on Mayday 1968, and people poured in with offers of help. When I think back on it, it was quite ...”

“... of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese history, and ...”