“... his acquaintance with Acts, here his most surprising, most decisive source. Whatever scholars may dig up (and scholars have more or less appropriated Golding since Lord of the Flies, after running its fantastic popular course, ended up in the classrooms of the world) he had almost to excess that qualification epic poets were once urged to acquire, and ...”

“... the 19th century – Vasari would have approved of such a commemorative initiative, and indeed he may have inspired it. Vasari was also the architect of the building itself. The lucid elevations, the combination of solemn grandeur and ceremony with rational order which they suggest, masked the stealthy despotism and expressed the new bureaucratic regularity ...”

“... to citizenship by respelling English words as unlikely-looking French ones: ouiski or coquetèle may not stop anyone in their tracks, but the same doesn’t go for le kékouok (which was danced in the 1920s) or le queneau-coutte (the blow that horizontalises heavyweights). Add to these his other lexical and phonetic deformations, his upmarket puns and the ...”

“... Cuvântul suppressed. The promised preface to Sebastian’s book was written after his release in May 1934, and by now he was more vehement than ever. For Sebastian the preface was ‘a tragedy . . . a death sentence’. Yet he felt bound to print it, and the book appeared in June to a barrage of criticism from all sides. Master and erstwhile disciple ...”

“... all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak then it is these, if I may speak.’ This is the characteristically opaque ‘English’ idiom of Translated Accounts. Although the novel is written in English, it is not the English of native speakers: the 54 ‘accounts’ that make up the book are presented in the preface as having ...”

“... intended to kill in order to commit murder. He or she (though murderers are almost always men) may even have intended not to kill, but only to cause serious physical injury. The category of ‘murder’ includes acts which vary hugely in their levels of culpability: from the premeditated ‘sexual, sadistic’ killing of a child to hitting over the head ...”

“... of internal division that established the conditions for the recent violence in Gaza. Europeans may wring their hands at what they see on their TVs, but European policy, acting in concert with the US, bears a large measure of responsibility for what has happened. The US and some European countries, including Britain, also chose to finance, train and arm the ...”

“... with a quasi-apology for what might not be accurate about the rest of the poem: ‘Of course I may be remembering it all wrong/after, after – how many years?’ After a rapt description of the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon rivers, Bishop glibly supposes that the beauty may be part fantasy: Suddenly ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... and upbeat report, drafted at Balfour’s request by his predecessor Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author ...”

“... On​ 27 May, Emmanuel Macron tweeted his outrage at the Israeli bombing of a tent encampment in Rafah that left at least 45 civilians dead. ‘These operations must stop,’ he wrote. ‘There are no safe areas in Rafah for Palestinian civilians. I call for full respect for international law and an immediate ceasefire ...”

“... He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it ...”

“... was asked to conduct a review of the evidence and policy options. He produced an interim report in May. Further reports, policy recommendations, focus group findings, stakeholder perspectives, league tables and national case studies have been issued by think tanks, charities, school leaders, academics and NGOs. As part of their ongoing campaign against ...”

“... are morally indefensible,’ and added: Even though the use of the new weapon last August may well have shortened the war, the moral cost was too high. As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan. In a life of public acts and public ...”

“... uses and meanings, of course, and we might say the more the better. The lives we imagine for crime may help us to see in it and around it, and thinking about crime may help us to think about other matters. Still, we need a way of managing the profusion, and I am going to suggest three major meanings or reference points for ...”