“... someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact. Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger: Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the ...”

“... do terrible damage to anything unarmoured it hits. But these Warriors looked tired. They came into service in the late 1980s, just as the Cold War they’d been designed for was ending, and Afghanistan has a way of diminishing and humbling military technology. I’d walked the same route last year, leaving Edington after breakfast, walking round the edge of ...”

“... and correspondence with his publisher, François Maspero. As the editors, Jean Khalfa and Robert Young, note, this body of writing – unfinished, restless, often agonised – reflects Fanon’s search for ‘freedom as dis-alienation’, itself a response to his experience of what Sartre called ‘extreme situations’: the battlefields of the Second ...”

“... product made in Germany.’ There we see the spirit of caricature at work, although in the service of making the ‘incomprehensible islanders’ understandable, so that they may be brought into a projected European Union. Leavis’s relative neglect of European letters (though he read in them) may be less significant than his attitude toward the ...”

“... the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides the day-to-day work of a City legal official and member of the King’s Council. Within a couple of years he was to be plunged into another – religious controversy. Politics and ...”

“... for their continued authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard ...”

“... replaced; trusted and trusting helpers and administrators were dumped after years of devoted service. Surviving the siren call of Aldeburgh required a special kind of mental discipline. When Heather Harper first went to sing for Britten she was warned: ‘When you go down there, you do your work, and then get away. Don’t try to get involved too ...”

“... it operates a strange amalgam of common law and Continental practice, and just as in 1946 Robert Jackson, who led the US legal team, was incapable of transcending his belief that the American system alone guarantees a fair trial, so in The Hague the American lawyers seem strangely unable to adapt to those elements of Continental practice which have ...”

“... and clocks, elevators and measuring rods, the tangible bric-à-brac of daily life pressed into service to make the unthinkable thinkable. This is certainly a visual procedure, but I would characterise it as a kind of literality too, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. I want to reinsert this problem into a philosophical context of far ...”

“... the autumn of 2018, Merkel was forced to sack Hans-Georg Maaßen as head of the internal security service (Verfassungsschutz) after he tried to discredit disturbing video evidence of racist violence in the East German town of Chemnitz. Supporters of the AfD have two common denominators: hostility to mass immigration and hostility to Merkel. This is true in ...”

“... sympathetic study of the ‘post-millennial’ generation (born since 1995), Gen Z Explained, Robert Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw and Linda Woodhead find students sifting through online materials and module choices in search of whatever seems most ‘relevant’ to them personally, or to the task they happen to be engaged with at that moment.* This ...”

“... idea of French liberty to smuggle himself onto a neighbouring island and try to enlist for active service. This first attempt ended in humiliating repatriation, but a year later he was on a boat full of fellow soldiers bound for Casablanca and then France. By the end of 1944, he was serving with the Sixth Regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais, pursuing the ...”

“... and arguably fending off recession. Second, along with the Clinton-era Treasury secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, he successfully lobbied for deregulation of the credit industry, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated investment banks from commercial banks. At the same time he blocked attempts to subject over the ...”

“... was permitted to emerge, but they were never allowed to assume positions of authority in the civil service or the army; at the time of independence only 17 Congolese had university degrees. Congo’s human potential was deliberately underdeveloped, on the assumption that white rule would last for ever. Colonial rule, however, had its contradictions. As Congo ...”

“... US Mint in Philadelphia, beginning on a salary of $5 a day that rose, in nearly thirty years’ service, to only $2500 a year, really did somehow challenge and defeat the crooked umpire (whom the young Pound goes on to suggest might have been bribed), this was very much the exception rather than the rule. Pound’s casually bullying letters to his father ...”