“... The chapters by Susan Watkins (on Nato and Russia), Régis Debray (on Nato and France) and Richard Seymour (on Nato and the UK) demonstrate its depth. But this is marginal dissent all the same. The alliance’s official motto – ‘animus in consulendo liber’, ‘in discussion a free mind’ – is almost unknown. But since Russia’s invasion of ...”

“... best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the ...”

“... greater difficulty in admitting that we knew all along that it was happening. By 1 August 2002, White House lawyers were itemising techniques that would not in their view constitute torture under the Federal Torture Act, including forced standing, hooding, starvation and thirst, sleep deprivation, the ‘frog crouch’, the Israeli shabeh and extreme ...”

“... only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.’ He is finding fault with himself on grounds Shelley provided: ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;/Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the ...”

“... determined the placements of pictures. Her mother and sister fill the other slots. The album is in white marble and it sits on a black polished slab on which we can just see, at the very bottom of the image, four stones, two black and two white, which are put on Jewish graves by visitors. The legend in black reads, ‘Mortes ...”

“... more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth ...”

“... each other. Birt’s first innovation was ‘producer choice’ (recommended by a Major government White Paper in 1992), which required BBC resource departments to charge producers the ‘real’ costs of their services, giving producers the complementary right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where ...”

“... open to the public – still serve as overdoors). One of Chardin’s most famous paintings, The White Tablecloth (or The Saveloy) in the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a high vanishing-point (anticipating examination from above) and originally had arched upper corners, must have been made to fill a chimney-piece in summer. Other leading painters of ...”

“... when people are handling euro coins and notes will they understand that the Union is more than white nights of herring quotas and Danish apples. Money, for Schopenhauer, was ‘an inexhaustible Proteus’ ever ready to be transformed into our newest and most pressing object of desire. In Spain and Portugal, the euro is somehow the guarantee that there will ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging comments, and she in turn, praising his ...”

“... of his ‘Rhymes’ upon the onward tide of time than of the snow-falls in the river, A moment white, then melts for ever! It might be some increasing consciousness of the frail tenure by which he holds his rank among the great heirs of Fame, that urged our Bard to pawn his reversion of immortality for an indulgent smile of patrician approbation, as he ...”

“... of Poetry, accepted five poems; in April 1915 two of her poems appeared in the Egoist, the paper Richard Aldington edited (‘I am so delighted to have them take me I shouldn’t mind if they charged me’); in August, HD invited her to come to London (she didn’t take up the invitation); and in October Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of Others, took five ...”

“... public services.’ Klein also presents a rogues’ gallery of statesmen-lobbyists (such as Richard Perle and Bruce Jackson) who made a strong public case for the invasion of Iraq and went on to make millions of dollars from the war and occupation. Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were capable of unleashing disasters, maintained their financial interests in ...”

“... hoping to find a house where she could spend the winter (their difficult stay is recounted by Richard Murphy in his autobiography The Kick). Hughes’s letters appear cheerful and engaged and free of guilt. At this time, curiously, he concocts a plan to send poems out under one or two pseudonyms. He wants to invent a rival poet, ‘or perhaps two’, who ...”