“... How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics, ‘was how much had changed since [the Black Lives Matter protests of] 2020. In a little over three years, the most influential institutions in the worlds of academia, the arts and multinational finance had evolved from fully genuflecting in front of zealous young activists to trying to silence and ...”

“... shatter the conventional categories of the resistance/collaboration dichotomy. As the history of black slavery should have taught us, the most unpromising situations afford some space for negotiation, and the guilt-laden compromises of the Judenräte were no exception. But each of the decisions taken – to meet Nazi demands in order to modify them, to ...”

“... of traditional leadership and social order’, in situations equivalent to that occasioned by the Black Death which preceded the great English Peasant Revolt of 1380. This sort of crisis creates a sense of total, oneiric alteration in which, since the time-honoured no longer functions, almost anything can be attempted. The world can be turned upside down. For ...”

“... and Buckhurst had in mind when they granted him his freedom from the Marshalsea. In this game of black propaganda, Thomas Drury increasingly emerges as a kind of impresario, a purveyor of these incriminating texts to the authorities. But who was he? He has proved elusive (not least because there is more than one Thomas Drury around at this time) but I can ...”

“... his head – ‘La, Sir! You’re always fancying things.’ One of the book’s recent champions, Michael Neve, finds it a ‘subtle meditation on the philosophical ludicrousness of love’, a ‘picture of driven desire that, with Freudian exactness, ends up without even an obscure object’. All the while Hazlitt continued his punishing schedule of literary ...”

“... film strips, children’s books, television sets. Eisner’s panels often float against black Expressionist nights or lightly inked Center City skylines. Some scenes are framed by purely visual devices: the beam of a flashlight, the viewfinder of a telescope, the jagged outlines of a bombed wall, the round windows in the door of a restaurant ...”

“... Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... ascent. In July 1933, he married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Second Earl of Iveagh, whose black stuff from the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin had made the family enormously rich. In best 18th-century fashion, Channon acquired a fortune, a house in Belgrave Square, a country house at Kelvedon in Essex and a seat in the House of ...”

“... power? Runciman is not alone in thinking they can. The same assumption can be found in the work of Michael Mann, of which Runciman has been a severe critic, but whose scale and focus invite comparison. The common source of this bias is Weber – the dominant influence on this cohort of British sociologists. Fixation with power has, of course, gone much further ...”

“... seeks to avoid can be seen from another version which forms the most instructive contrast with it, Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice. Unlike Berlin’s, Walzer’s pluralism is designed to reconcile differing values within any society by allocating separate regions of jurisdiction to each – consumption, welfare, office-holding, art – in a normative ...”

“... Body Shop bottles on the bathroom shelf – Duse exudes, well, a certain sublimity. She’s all in black, in some kind of elegant, judicial-looking, Portia-like robe, and leans against a Greek column on a terrace, head tilted up to the heavens. She’s obviously standing on a stage – there’s a pale cardboard mountain and painted cataract in the far ...”

“... as he sat on the verandah of his two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead. He had the serenity of a man at the end of his life. And, given the circumstances, he had not done too badly. I had spent much of that day on the road from Kathmandu to the Tarai, shuffling past long queues of ...”

“... and would record at Gold Star Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. And for the equivalent of the Black-Cherokee-Irish lead vocalist Ronnie Bennett he would choose … himself. ‘I wanted to be a girl in my voice,’ he once said, ‘I wanted to sing like a girl. Not consciously, but it was all figured out in my brain, waiting for me to do it.’ So there it ...”

“... presence somewhere offstage: ‘dark Ahab’, ‘wild Ahab’, ‘moody stricken Ahab’, ‘black terrific Ahab’, ‘crazy Ahab’, ‘inflexible Ahab’, ‘untottering Ahab’, Ahab with his ‘despot eye’. It would be strange, all the same, if our appreciation of his tragic character, his Promethean ambition and his radicalism – the ability to ...”