“... now prefers to think of an ethnographic documentary as a site at which different views of reality may be revealed and explored, allowing viewers to formulate their own interpretations. This idea of documentary entails the acceptance of a degree of ambiguity that is at odds with an anthropology aimed at demonstrating the coherence of other cultures through ...”

“... It leaves one thinking about what might have been in China, and fearing that such an opportunity may never come again. Modern political life has existed there only briefly, in the first part of the 20th century, when there were small-scale (but important) student protests and strikes as well as elections, independent newspapers and universities and many ...”

“... and the Resistance movements in the Conseil National de la Résistance, which met in Paris on 27 May 1943. The following month he was arrested near Lyon, where he had organised another Resistance meeting. No one knows exactly how or when Moulin died – he was last seen semi-comatose after a horrific beating at Montluc prison; indeed, it isn’t certain that ...”

“... residents, in common with Palestinians in the rest of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, may neither leave their town nor return to it without written permission from the Israeli authorities. Permits are difficult to obtain and stipulate fixed times of return, after which the holder can be arrested. Like the Israeli settlements of Har Homa and Gilo ...”

“... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...”

“... David Richardson is more outspoken in an essay on the economics of the slave trade. Differences may exist among historians about the amount of money the slave trade made for Britain, but he has little doubt that merchants of the British Empire, the leading shippers of slaves to America, made life hell for the Africans. When slavery was abolished throughout ...”

“... some reviewer, next month, ‘gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)’, the heated critic should not be exasperated at being treated with ‘good temper’. Like the fly that buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose all through dinner, he would be allowed to buzz off ...”

“... of a tidy, well-organised life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels written, may be surprised. My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative.’ Bad analogy, and a tad tasteless. Epileptic seizures are uninvited. Moody’s fits were self-induced. Early in The Black Veil, Moody mentions his father ...”

“... been one of my favourite subjects.’ In general, of course, there is nothing wrong in that. It may even be admirable. But when writing a book in which political events are inevitably one of the most important features it has its disadvantages. For instance, he writes of ‘Little Clem’ Attlee. Attlee was small in stature but in nothing else. He was ...”

“... of the Middle Ages, whose principles they believed Charles to have broken. The Earl of Bedford may, as Adamson observes, have shown an acquaintance with the political practices of ancient and modern republics in his notebooks. So did a great many other people in theirs. But there is nothing to connect that intellectual cosmopolitanism to the schemes of the ...”

“... Gold (the first of a three-volume study to be entitled Bolshevism and the British Left), which may also be read with profit by those interested in current debates about the funding of the Labour Party. In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the ...”

“... is the motif of Stravinsky’s career. Walsh speculates in his first volume that the notion may have come from the views of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose suggestion that ‘the tedium of living and willing stops at the door of every studio’ is wonderfully apt for Stravinsky, the most detached if domestically tyrannical of ...”

“... lives would have been sacrificed for little or no gain. Therefore, the precautionary principle may require the needless sacrifice of innocent life whether it is applied to war in Iraq or to the emission of carbon dioxide. In both cases, the argument must be the same: it’s worth taking a chance on the needless sacrifice of innocent lives only because the ...”

“... theorems, equations and ‘synoptic tables of lyric values’. At a performance in London in May 1914 of Zang Toumb Toumb, he also had a telephone installed on stage, into which he barked orders to his only English disciple, the painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who would then bang two enormous drums in an adjoining room. Zang Toumb Toumb, translated into English ...”

“... effectiveness of any medical intervention. That’s to say, medical therapies did little good, and may well have done much harm. And then it all changed. Medicine now ‘works’: Wootton sees no reason to qualify the claim or to mobilise a mass of evidence in its favour. So progress must be acknowledged, but failure must be specially explained. Wootton’s ...”