“... and Jinmium stone circles in the Kimberley (40,000 BCE), however their datings and meanings may be contested, have entered the Australian imagination, intensifying the almost redemptive durability with which Aboriginal culture taunts settler society. The tourist industry has been quick to promote primordial Aboriginality as the major cultural attraction ...”

“... when I come away there is a line of cars he’s hired waiting to take all the old ladies home. 1 May. ‘He/she died in my arms’ is an odd phrase. M. used it of Tulip, the last of her goats who snuffed it a few weeks back. ‘She was so clever,’ M. said, ‘waiting until we got back from Rome, then dying in my arms at 10.30 the next morning.’ It ...”

“... grimness of most of the story. For younger readers, formed in the Thatcherite world, the account may arouse the same incredulity, concerning a world they could barely imagine, as a visit to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. But this passionless account comes at a price. The second telling aspect is Heath’s extraordinary lack of reflection about ...”

“... network of linguistic tensions between that material and familiar, or possibly familiar, forms. We may take ‘seta’, for example, as pre-lexemic English or as common Italian, and the rest of the text sets up similar problems that call for the reader’s decision. The text might be read as a kind of ruin in which we glimpse pieces of an ancient world, hints ...”

“... length and breadth of the British feminist pedigree. British feminist effort between 1860 and 1914 may sometimes seem fragmented, she says, but in reality it concentrated fire from several directions on the same target – male exploitation of the female sex – and gained force from the many-sidedness of its approach. This aspect of Kent’s argument is less ...”

“... The husband represents the conjugal union. He is also personally liable for his own acts whatever may be the system under which the matrimonial property is held. For Dickinson, our lives are Swiss, like watches or legal codes. Everything is staked out for us in the high-precision language of legal draughtsmanship and cultural engineering. According to ...”

“... first boatloads of 730 convicts (160 female) and 250 free persons, mainly marines, left England in May 1787 under the command of Captain (later Governor) Arthur Phillip, reaching Botany Bay nine months later. Finding the environment inclement, they promptly moved a little way along the coast to Sydney Cove, site of the later city. The French had also ...”

“... popular culture and the media seems to wax ever greater even as American economic power wanes. It may not, in fact, matter very much who wins the next American Presidential election, or indeed the one after that. Maybe we should be thinking, not of 1988 or 1992, but of 1996. America has no real alternative to continuing imperial decline: the big questions are ...”

“... can be a third explanation. If the misrepresentation of Edward Atiyah ever ceases, the credit may be due to a number of Israeli scholars who have spent years in their country’s archives attempting to discover and present the truth. Among them are Yehoshua Porath, professor of Middle East History at the Hebrew University, and several younger historians ...”

“... to me historically false. It can be true – though one community’s conception of moral unity may well not be another’s – but frequently is not. The Report has to argue this, of course, because it is trying to assimilate two differing traditions – both to be found on the British left. One is the commitment to social justice as a principle; the other ...”

“... Kissinger himself escapes very lightly. That brings us back to ‘globalism’. Whatever may be thought of Kissinger’s lack of scruple and judgment, his conceit and treachery to colleagues, nobody has thought him a fool. Yet he probably did more than any other man to block a comprehensive settlement both before and after the 1973 war. Nixon’s ...”

“... only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished ...”

“... the Jewish tribes of Medina and waged jihad against the Meccan polytheists. Though his campaigns may have been moderate by the standards of the day, the precedents remain, enshrined in the Qur’an and still usable by those modern Islamist ideologues who push aside centuries of qualifying scholarship with a dismissive sweep of the hand. Commenting on the ...”

“... in the late 1870s. However complex and controversial his attitude to historic Jewry and Judaism may have been, however much his philhellenism and his attack on Christianity (as a noxious, concentrated progression from Judaism) informed his judgment of the historic place of Jews and their religion, he had nothing but contempt for the cheap demagogy of ...”

“... magazine or in one of his papers, and these comments filled me with a childish joy. He died on 24 May, of cancer, at the age of 87. Mitchell was born on 27 July 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, a small farming community interspersed with swamps and woods, fifty miles or so inland from the Atlantic Ocean. His father was a farmer and a tobacco and cotton ...”