“... but completely overlooked case-by-case study of American news decisions, reporters may be liberal on some issues, but they are reliably conservative on economic questions. This is one of the reasons, Lieberman argues, that right-wing foundations have had such gratifying media support for their views on welfare reform, Nafta and Social Security ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”

“... well, not of Burke, but of Philip Francis, who had once been a friend of Burke’s (though he may not have been ‘Junius’ anyway). At times Hitchens’s prose seems entirely shaped by his tireless search for inconsequential correspondences. My favourite is this: ‘Just as Paine’s joke about dress and lost innocence was intended to remind his ...”

“... make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us. Still, all else being equal, whoever gives up least is the winner; so it matters whether Strawson has abandoned more than he needs to. I’m not convinced that we will have to throw ...”

“... Henry St George in Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’ resides. The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these ...”

“... many people looked to Cuba as a beacon of hope . . . Cuba would not disappoint them. One may agree or disagree with Castro’s view of history, but this was certainly what he believed in 1959, when he entered Havana in triumph. And it is his belief today, as he continues to defy Washington’s imperial will. Coltman’s perceptiveness on this matter ...”

“... about Cragh among the rest of the de Briouze household, one cannot help wondering whether there may have been something more than a routine response and ordinary feminine pity at work in this instance, something which is now irrecoverably lost to us. The three great churchmen who presided over the 1307 inquiry all continued thereafter in careers that ...”

“... been those carried out against liberal intellectuals with no ability to protect themselves. It may be that this impression of haplessness derives in large part from Wakeman’s reliance on the memoir of a one-time Dai subordinate who later turned Communist, Shen Zui. Shen’s account is indispensable, but it is also a sophisticated propaganda product that ...”

“... your trip to be, the Hudson Valley feels like a reassuring antidote to the city’s friction. It may have ghosts, but it no longer advertises them. My tattered guidebook, for instance, unlike Richardson’s, describes Olana, the opulent and overbearing mansion once owned by the Hudson River artist Frederic Church, as ‘enchanting’, adding benignly: ‘The ...”

“... a comparison – not mine – with a journey through the great intestine. The great outdoors may be more what Nouvel and his team had in mind. In the event it’s all very Aardman Animations; the leather upholstery on the partitions simply elevates a clunky failure of taste into an error of judgment: leather means cattle, cattle means pasture and pasture ...”

“... writers, who feel starved for source material in an era of record-low crime rates.) In early May, Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode about a pretty aspiring actress whose boyfriend claims she was shot during a Lower East Side mugging. But for network television, the slaying of a blonde by poor black kids was either too obvious or too crude. In ...”

“... The Birth of a Nation may not be the greatest movie ever made (whatever that might mean), but it is the one that has had the greatest impact on America and, indirectly, the world. Never was a movie more aptly named; and rarely have quotations marks been more superfluous than in the subtitle of Melvyn Stokes’s informative book ...”

“... there when it was just a military prison. For penologists, the most intriguing part of Alcatraz may be the material that shows how many prisoners made another life after release. Was there something in the hours of solitary reflection and reading that enlarged their lives? Another legend was that Alcatraz was escape-proof. The structure of the prison was ...”

“... La Princesse de Clèves, a 17th-century novel of love and duty set in the court of Henri II. This may not sound like a sure-fire way to wrest a climbdown from a government still contending with a general strike in one of its overseas possessions, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and with the fallout from a day of action that had seen up to three million ...”

“... poured in enormous numbers of men and huge quantities of matériel. Sherman and Churchill tanks may have been no match for the Tiger but there were far, far more of them and that was the telling factor. On 30 July the Allies took Avranches but the battle went on into August as frantic German counterattacks were first held and then crushed. Avranches was the ...”