“... airy, blasted, dead-drunk pieces are little exercises in sardonicism that by the end of a tune may have locked a grin on the singer’s face like tetanus; his songs lie beneath the masked voice in ‘Lo and Behold!’, not as something to outdo or transcend but as a tradition to explore for whatever stories it might have told, but didn’t.Frank Hutchison ...”

“... At that time, there were neither girls pining for a husband nor men without a wife. You may be fond of women, but so long as you share this fondness with the people, how can it interfere with your becoming a true king?’ As long as he was improving the lives of the Chinese people Mao’s behaviour was acceptable to Li. Once the doctor realised that ...”

“... be an attempt to fashion a nationalist/populist Conservative Party further from the centre. Major may be feted by the Sun at the moment, but it isn’t likely to last, unless he makes a habit of sucking up to the far right. After the Tories lost 600 councillors in the recent local elections the paper announced JOHN’S GONE but shed no tears. Though it ...”

“... James’s statecraft’ on Cymbeline, and gives a modest account of how such external knowledge may help the reader: ‘My claim is not that our apprehending this will make the play perfect but that it will make much of the play more explicable; the enterprise makes sense.’ Moderns might even glimpse something of what Hell must have looked like, to those ...”

“... experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications’. A similar precision is demanded when exploring the ethnocentrism of the patriot slaveholder. Not only did Jefferson wish to maintain America as a white democracy by exporting free blacks to Africa, he aimed to preserve in ...”

“... called A la Recherche du Shoe Perdu. Warhol’s pretty shoes, we gather from other sources, may in fact be inky revelations of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights ...”

“... indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have been the determining factor. Again, Hogg recognised that Churchill had gone too far with his infamous 1945 campaign speech claiming that Labour in power would require a Gestapo, but still he insisted that this ludicrous idea contained ‘a germ of most ...”

“... every visitor as if they were a ten-year-old on a school project. On the other hand, while we may enjoy the theatricality of Strong’s remake and welcome the reminders about when and where the Battle of Newbury was, we inevitably regret the removal of large numbers of paintings to make way for all these trimmings and chafe at the intrusive packaging of ...”

“... novel (or Pack My Bag) said it sounded as if it were written when the author was drunk; which it may well have ...”

“... seemed exhausted, and now we find ourselves obliged to renew our vigilance, because the process may continue. The simulator’s mock-academic investigation of the ‘meaning of life’ has effectively bypassed the more problematic, overworked ‘meaning of living’. Casey’s own interest in a materialist form of transcendence eventually led him to ...”

“... to Oklahoma City, LA does not become the new tornado capital of the United States. No, Los Angeles may not have the exceptional ecology that Davis claims, but yes, science and not fiction discovers the natural hazards in its erratic environment. Ecology of Fear would lose none of its force if it stuck with what it does so well, excavating the hidden history of ...”

“... in his name. Marxism is not Karl Marx, it is true, any more than Darwinism is Charles Darwin. You may not be astonished by this thought. ‘What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being.’ Perhaps such an admission is so ...”

“... and opening the way to a harmless era of distraction, of Carnaby Street and the Beatles. Thorpe may be right to feel sorry for Eden because he simply found himself ‘on the wrong square of the political chessboard’ at the wrong time, but the whole point about political leadership is to know which square you’re on and to plan ...”

“... as ‘naive’: surely he was no more so than the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours? Indeed he may well still be being widely read as authoritative in some quarters, just as the Le Pens of this world will go on reading Gregory and his modern retailers because it suits their purposes. Ethnicity is ‘impervious to mere rational disproof’. This is why ...”

“... Thomson concludes: ‘We could note several things from this: that one man’s carnal ecstasy may be another’s imagination; that sometimes there are no excuses; and that the language of self-inducing cinematic exultation is oddly akin to the rhetoric of fascism.’ Sheer joy. And as for Roberto Benigni’s god-help-us-all Oscar-winning La Vita è ...”