“... on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by Bob Astles. Long after the publication in 1974 of David Martin’s General Amin might have been expected to bring some constraint, Fleet Street went on with the joke – spiced as it was with prurient pleasure in a wickedness hard to credit, completely, in the security of somewhere far away across the world. The ...”

“... space travel. As Fressoz points out, this schema is misleading. The first railways ran on rails held together by timber sleepers and, in the US, timber sleepers still predominate. American railway companies don’t want to spend more money than they have to and insist that timber handles extremes of temperature better than the concrete sleepers more ...”

“... First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the next war to seek refuge. But he risks being held as an enemy alien (Pressburger himself had to report regularly to the police and was not permitted to stay on location overnight). When Theo is cross-examined by a sceptical judge about his reasons for returning to Britain, Pressburger shows us England ...”

“... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...”

“... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...”

“... who would pay the price of its not being noticed? Whites? In his Introduction to Colour Conscious, David Wilkins observes that the white citizens of America and Britain mostly don’t see themselves as having a race. Their culture is just ‘British culture’ or ‘American culture’ or, unselfconsciously, simply the way things are. Wilkins, Appiah, Gutmann ...”

“... for human rights than its predecessors. People are picked up in the middle of the night and held in prison without notification of their relatives. Trials also take place after dark – they are known as ‘the midnight specials’ – and make no pretence of justice. The economic position is disastrous. Unemployment, we are told, is 70 percent, and ...”

“... a prototype Civil War Experience. Amazingly, Strong’s Diaries (which cover the period when he held two of the top jobs in British museums, first the directorship of the National Portrait Gallery, then of the V&A) never touch on any of these central issues. Strong’s view seems to be a very simple one. He has no time at all for what he once described as ...”

“... than hints at the difference of ‘inner character’. The two parts of The Roman Mistress are held together by the figure of Cleopatra, with one essay on her image in Rome under Augustus leading into two chapters on Cleopatra movies from the early 20th century to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 ‘Lizpatra’, as the Taylor/Burton epic was nicknamed. The first ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... of his painting and his lack of interest in appealing to our ‘tenderer feelings’ was not held against him and, once Fry had discovered Seurat and embraced formalism, these became emphatically positive qualities. Only the quietest of human exchanges are rendered memorably by Piero, and this has suited those artists who have learned from him. Semiramis ...”

“... the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April. The Turkish war was both unsuccessful and unpopular. In the view of the new Imperial ...”

“... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...”

“... his microminiatures. His first exhibition, sponsored by the Armenian Allied Arts Association, was held in 1986 and featured ‘eye-of-a-needle portraits’ of Napoleon, a Spanish dancer, Donald Duck and several other Disney characters, as well as a grain of rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall ...”

“... a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ‘La Bolaing’. So far so good. But how it was that Anne held out for marriage rather than a more conventional relationship, and why Henry allowed her to dictate her terms when his original intention was to make her his mistress, are other questions altogether. Henry was already trying to free himself from the ...”