“... exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as ...”

“... and the Chancellor incident of July 1982 stands as something of a monument to the process. John Chancellor is a leading American television commentator who arrived in Beirut during the siege and witnessed the destruction brought about by the indiscriminate bombing that was taking place all around him. The report he produced in full view of a vast ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... remotely like that of the man with the tonsure? But brilliant, knowing … And more deeply Christian (if that’s what one wanted, and surely one did) than even dear Bouts. More compassionate and ironic about our exit from original sin. More modern in its picture of sanctity.Bosch​ – speaking now to the heart of his work, to the people in the ...”

“... savage tribes, like those elsewhere in the British Empire, needed the clarifying light of Christian missionaries or exposure to scientific reason.The maps were imaginative artefacts as much as scientific documents. In the new folio they have been ‘re-curated’, as the cover blurb puts it, with just a hint of the coffee-table book. The maps are ...”

“... McAllester and Anderson feature in each other’s books and both spend time eating with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent whom they describe frequently as the ‘doyen’ or the ‘veteran’ of the press pack. They describe the same briefings, the same riverside search for a downed American pilot, the same wait for B-52s flying from ...”

“... Their way of life reached its peak between the 10th and 12th centuries, as reckoned by the Christian calendar. From the ruins they left behind, it is clear that they were remarkable architects and engineers. Among their most celebrated achievements are the so-called Great Houses, large edifices erected from blocks of sandstone and sometimes reaching ...”

“... It could have been lifted from Down Cemetery Road, the 1964 BBC Monitor documentary presented by John Betjeman, in which Philip Larkin, a very different librarian-poet, bicycle clips firm around trouser bottoms, obligingly wheels his way into the damp monochrome of a country church.Prynne’s brief and unwanted celebrity followed the publication in 2004 of ...”

“... imagined progress – from an oral original form in pagan times to its modern meaning as a Christian allegory. The three chapters on Keats, Byron and Coleridge are all important, at times brilliant. The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... was also able to attract support from Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Chester Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after the war, Buckley and his fellow conservative students ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... Jew from Alexandria. He might as well have been. Born in Jerusalem in 1935 to well-off Palestinian Christian parents, he had grown up in the twilight years of multicultural Cairo, where many of his classmates were Egyptian Jews. His piano teacher was Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had moved to Cairo in 1931 and founded a French-speaking ...”

“... Arendt are employed to discuss anything from the depiction of autocrats in Cameroonian cartoons to Christian eschatology to posthumanism. We may not be sure where all this leads us, but Mbembe has never been interested in supplying easy answers to difficult questions.In Germany and France, Mbembe has (against his will) become the public face of an ill-defined ...”

“... the village, police were stopping trucks and cars. A few miles further on, at a fort in a Chaldean Christian village called Bartilla, we exchanged the pick-ups for military vehicles, fitted with armour-plating and bullet-proof windows like spyholes. In Nineveh province the curfew was being taken seriously. There are gypsum-processing kilns along the road that ...”