“... discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the Queen, presumably without warning, forcing her to adjudicate between two fictional rival ...”

“... much like Manda Elizalde’s garden on a grand scale. The Fair’s twenty million visitors may have arrived in a state of complete ignorance, but having watched the antics of the captive Filipinos they presumably went away feeling virtuous that their country had brought belated civilisation to these savages. Filipinos still shudder at the memory of the ...”

“... said, ‘but there’s something missing. You could call it moral responsibility.’ The bombers may have been bound together by a conviction they were working ‘in the name of Allah’, but they did not heed the second half of the prayer which Muslims are supposed to say as they begin any significant action: ‘In the name of Allah, the most ...”

“... he asked an old woman why she thought this might be so, she replied: ‘I’m thinking, sir, it may have something to do with the postwar influx of American ...”

“... his fondness for hyperbole, and his ever-growing obsession with glamour. Max and India may have started out as cool and conceptual, but they end as a fantasy of sophistication and omni-competence that would make Ian Fleming blush. Their gilded world is about to be rudely invaded, however: the ambassador is slaughtered on his daughter’s doorstep ...”

“... Written in a Country Churchyard is confronted with the speaker’s own epitaph. Gray’s narrator may have ‘gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished), a friend’, but for women poets, that friend and not the solitude of ‘fair Melancholy’ is the necessary precondition of poetic speech. In her compelling claim that the friendship poem – which seems to ...”

“... ceases to be one), there is likewise no fact of the matter about whether a thing is a car; it may be a car according to your story but not according to mine and, in principle, there’s nothing to choose between the stories. So, it’s all or nothing: if there’s no matter of fact at the margins, there’s none in the middle either. I look out of the ...”

“... applicability. The rise of homosexuality into a more overt and articulated aspect of our lives may itself be an indicator of our arrival at a cultural state removed from the central anxieties of agricultural peoples – owning land and giving birth. Thus we now have the responsibility of making myths of our own. Our interest in films, TV etc can be ...”

“... is a celebration of America’s black Hip-Hop culture and the films of Spike Lee. All this may seem like a thinly disguised celebration of Diawara’s own successful career in France and the United States, but the long, disturbing quest for Sidimé Laye tells a different story. One of the book’s most original sections is Diawara’s paean to African ...”

“... wild life had been wiped out along with trees. This was the work of the natives but – the reader may wonder – what sort of example had they been set? In King Solomon’s Mines Allan Quatermain’s party shoot half a herd of elephant for sport, tearing out the hearts from two of them for food and leaving the rest. If vultures were absent, mosquitoes and ...”

“... mass poverty and social injustice go unaddressed. A United Nations report published in May described what is now a nihilistic conflict unfolding in Liberia and the surrounding region, involving armed youths moving freely between four countries. The document is an implicit criticism of those in the international community who for years have ...”

“... hitting the ball all over the place – a division long replicated by gentleman batsmen (Cowdrey, May, Dexter) and working-class bowlers (Bedser, Trueman, Statham). Professional soccer changed all that: the spectators and their heroes on the pitch were alike proletarian. Upper-class amateurism could not dominate (or even long survive) a game which commanded ...”

“... of Milanese mercenaries he had stationed outside the city. As the Pazzi now discovered, Lorenzo may have been young, but he was as hardheaded a warrior as the mercenaries among whom he had grown up: the handsome brutes Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan and Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini. For the next ten years, Lorenzo would contrive savage revenge on his ...”

“... to study in moulding their own attitudes and policies in the age of advancing globalisation. They may be unfashionable questions in today’s cultural climate, but they require cogent, responsible answers. In recent years, the most aggressive efforts to arouse nativist sentiments have backfired badly. When California’s Governor Pete Wilson spoke out in ...”

“... are both commodities to be traded up by those with social aspirations is nicely overturned. You may love Kate but you hanker for a slag. And there’s the hint of a solution to the dilemma in the ad, which as well as making the connection between food and sex is also perhaps offering them as alternatives, suggesting that the lower appetite might be assuaged ...”