“... mere plaything, crushed by the all-powerful gods. Aristotle, Scholasticism and Greek tragedy, it may be said, lie outside Porter’s period. Bernard de Mandeville, however, is squarely within it. Porter concludes, again too rapidly and simply, that Mandeville was opposed to Cartesian dualism, on the ground that he emphasised the close correlation of emotion ...”

“... its repression, the refugee figures rose steeply. About 18,000 refugees arrived in West Berlin in May, and nearly 12,600 in the first two weeks of July. These numbers are accepted as evidence that the GDR now faced imminent disaster, only averted by the closing of the Berlin border on 13 August. But even if the July figure had been maintained, the total for ...”

“... of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. It may well have been such views, along with her criticisms of Zionism in 1944 and 1948, that led to Gershom Scholem’s sharp allegations against Arendt in an exchange of letters in 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Scholem called her ...”

“... business interests. Black senior died in 1976 by falling over the banisters at his home; he may have committed suicide – in any case, Conrad saw it happen. ‘Life is hell,’ the father told the son while they waited for medical attention. ‘Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.’ He died later that night. It’s no surprise to ...”

“... world, Williams’s poem promises a sympathy, and a sensory immediacy, which other kinds of poetry may lack. The aural toolkit developed by Williams was ideally suited to poems concerned with motion: cars, trains, pedestrians, runners, fire engines, gulls, robins, swallows, ‘tideless waves thundering slantwise against/ strong embankments’, a sheet of ...”

“... Mac against a US standard. Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and the McDonald’s brand, or the more specific brand of the Big Mac, is worth a lot. Note, however, that the ...”

“... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...”

“... from a political point of view, the Berlin Wall served to calm the situation in Berlin.’ That may sound cold-hearted. But it’s an accurate judgment, though Hoyer also quotes the agony of Berliners, who were the real victims of this wretched event. The Wall was soon overgrown by wreaths of hypocritical propaganda. (I remember a British trade union ...”

“... comes to the impacts on planetary life. Our increasingly sophisticated climate science modelling may give us a clearer picture of some aspects of future warming, but we can’t predict how the world’s human and non-human systems will react. We don’t have any useful analogues, and we can’t run experiments on a practice planet to study their ...”

“... years after his death,’ Bidder writes, ‘inconsistencies in Magnitsky’s story suggest he may not have been the hero many people – and Western governments – believed him to be.’ Bidder casts doubt on Browder’s claim that Magnitsky was targeted after voluntarily approaching Russia’s investigative committee in 2008 with a witness statement ...”

“... has considerably strengthened Nato. As Biden told graduates of the US Naval Academy in Maryland in May 2022, the Russian invasion had ‘Natoised’ Europe. Over the last two years Nato’s ‘enhanced forward presence’ – established in 2017 in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland – has expanded to south-eastern Europe, with new battlegroups in ...”

“... the final days of the war he had come to suspect that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in ...”

“... the mannerisms that characterise ‘mezzo-Hemingways’ and Woolf’s ‘weaker sisters’, while May Sinclair is chastised for turning out books ‘with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other’. The one genre in which Parker didn’t complain about duplication, on either the stage or the page, was crime. She confessed herself ‘a ...”

“... beasts that are not clean’ (according to Genesis 7:1-3). Scientists today estimate that there may be as many as 8.7 million extant animal species. In AiG’s ‘worst-case scenario’, however, ‘Noah was responsible for fewer than 6744 individual animals.’ AiG argues that the Hebrew word min (‘sort’ or ‘kind’) does not correspond to the modern ...”

“... Heaven,’ Banks wrote in his journal, ‘I have a sufficiency, and I do not know why I may not keep him as a curiosity as well as my neighbours do lions and tygers at a larger expence than he will ever probably put me to.’ In the event, his Tahitian curiosities didn’t make it back to Britain; they both died of malaria in the East Indies. In ...”