“... let alone internationally, would have been very small indeed. The new ‘military humanism’ may have its rational advocates but they are hugely outnumbered by the sceptics, who refuse to believe that governments commit their armies unilaterally to a war for any such generous purpose. It’s not in any case as if we had to wait for American and British ...”

“... have seemed to some people as if Christmas had come early. Too early, perhaps. Madeleine Albright may have had this in mind when she said in the Fox News green room last month: ‘Do you suppose that the Bush Administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?’ She claims that she was joking; Fox journalist ...”

“... first small piece of faulty seamanship was a farce from beginning to end. The second small piece may not have begun as a farce but it certainly ended as one, when the 15 sailors and marines who had been taken into charge by the Iranians were flamboyantly released, wearing the not too ill-fitting new suits that they had been given, rather as if they too were ...”

“... care to reward their poets, for they determine if and how their patrons will be remembered. You may think, St John continues, that the Greeks won at Troy and that Penelope was faithful to her husband because it pleased Homer to say so, but the facts are otherwise: E se tu vuoi che ’l ver non ti sia ascoso, tutta al contrario l’istoria converti: che i ...”

“... and dates while denying what they were most anxious to convey: fear, horror and loathing. Sceptics may conclude that just as there was, to quote the exhibition’s accompanying book, a ‘19th-century view of the Vikings purely as raiders and killers’ – a view powered by the Victorians’ readiness to see themselves, their navy and the British Empire as a ...”

“... media, and deployed his wealth to political and personal advantage. (In 2008, in a verdict that may or may not have been political in nature, he and his wife were convicted in absentia of a multi-million-pound property cheat.) He was cheerfully unabashed about diverting government largess towards regions that voted for ...”

“... the fragment and then an attempt to complete and translate it. The book’s author, Charles Adams, may have been trying to compensate for the flimsy plot. Twin girls, who share a psychic ability to feel each other’s pain, are separated as children when the younger, Catherine, is stolen by Gypsies. The elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married but is always ...”

“... the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war. The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement ...”

“... that rules the Kurdish enclaves along the border. I was 15 miles east of Tal Abyad at the end of May when Kurdish women soldiers in the frontline were speaking guardedly of the coming offensive. There was a constant roar of aircraft overhead, probably American, but I didn’t hear any airstrikes. Nujaan, a 27-year-old veteran of the Kurdish women’s ...”

“... flogging himself on the cross-trainer in the first place. But in another sense the affinity may be worth pursuing. Probably no book of essays could now do for its generation what Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination did in 1950 (it certainly couldn’t sell the 70,000 copies that collection shifted in hardback). But Against Everything does aspire to do ...”

“... displacement of people in Arab-dominated areas taken from IS, especially around Kirkuk. The KDP may succeed in pushing IS out of these areas and may even help retake Mosul, but if Washington fails to rein in the KDP’s territorial ambitions it is likely to find that the phenomenon of Sunni Arab radicalisation that ...”

“... Responsibility of Intellectuals’ (1967). ‘The question “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves,’ Chomsky wrote, ‘as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defence of freedom.’ Chomsky’s route to this position began with his ...”

“... composer. According to the Times, reviewing his memorial concert in 1934, ‘whatever else he may be Delius is not an acquired taste.’ His music either ‘captivates at once and those who have been captivated may go on to discern new varieties within the rather limited range of emotions it represents’ – or it does ...”

“... Swede’, he wrote. Edmund Wilson accused her of failing at characterisation and storytelling: she may be a ‘good craftsman’ but she has ‘an anemia of the imagination’ and is given ‘to terrible lapses into feminine melodrama’. Discussing ‘the subtle failure of her admirable art’, Lionel Trilling saw Cather’s emphatic nostalgia as a rejection ...”

“... Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to sap the narrative. What will constitute a ‘happening’ in the narrative, and how one happening will be represented as leading to another, must vary ...”