“... neither of which can afford to let the other win uncontested control of the country. Lebanon may well be the ‘battleground of the Middle East’, as Hirst’s subtitle puts it, but this does not explain how it has become a lethal trap for its tormentors. The absence of government appears to make the country easy meat, but would-be occupiers find that ...”

“... of critique is closely bound up with the setting of limits, distinguishing what a form of inquiry may legitimately address from what is off-bounds to it. Rita Felski’s bold, stylish new study, however, is about critique in the less specialised sense of critical analysis. It is not a work about the limits of setting limits but a critical view of the idea of ...”

“... the truth so foul a lie.’ The ‘more perjured eye’ is also a more perjured ‘I’, and we may hear a faint announcement of Macbeth’s unintended verbal collusion with the witches. When he says he has never seen ‘so foul and fair a day’, he doesn’t yet know that ‘fair is foul and foul is fair.’ The sonnet is full of energy and wit in its ...”

“... but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived – it was a Saturday morning – there seemed not to be anyone outside. Somewhere the mayor’s son was getting married, and I’d been warned that no one would be available to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window ...”

“... can’t properly be counted, that the election system is corrupt, that whoever becomes president may be a thief. As its avatar and publicist, Trump is responsible for this disorder, and the fever is worse on the right, but only a few months ago liberals were pointing to the apparently routine removal and rearrangement of mailboxes as a sign of chicanery ...”

“... Boyd is fond of verbal foreplay, though at sixty-odd pages (in a 324-page novel) the preliminaries may seem a little stretched for some, more impulsive, appetites. This, the Los Angeles section of the book (set in 1936), opens: ‘I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the ...”

“... productive and controversial as ever. The agenda he has set out is far from completion: indeed we may only just be appreciating its measure. The volume concludes with a lengthy commentary by Pocock himself which, in reviewing each of the essays, primarily asks, not how far his earlier positions are vindicated by them, but where we should go next. The last ...”

“... very last did my path cross that of the Cambridge spies. It was on a warm, sunny afternoon last May at Kuntsevo Cemetery on the western outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent ...”

“... to be me and not somebody’s idea of me.’ The final verdict on the television election, then, may be that both its novelty and its impact were much overrated; that, given the changes in technology and idiom, most of the tricks of populist media manipulation had been tried before – and anyway they did not make any difference in the end. What mattered was ...”

“... it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century – but for the fact that both try to explain something about how ...”

“... of your devotion as you have been of mine.’ Auberon explains: ‘I do not think, as others may decide, that the ... sentence was intended ironically. Or at any rate, not very ironically. It certainly was not intended as an embittered father’s curse.’ Well, he should know – except that, on the matter of his dad, Auberon Waugh is not the most ...”

“... or cauchemar, as the Russians say – odd that they don’t have their own word for it. It may seem in order to Milton Friedman that Russian citizens trade in dollars as much as in roubles, that the road from the airport into town is marked by a procession of billboards advertising ventures with fly-by-night names like Inkombank and Discountbank, that ...”

“... while the tricyclics have unpleasant side-effects, like dryness of the mouth. Although they may possibly be less severe, Prozac, too, has side-effects; to name but a few: rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, insomnia, anxiety, tremor, dry mouth, dizziness and difficulty in reaching orgasm. There is no such thing as a free lunch when taking ...”

“... old man. But the hedonistic aspect of Christmas finds its extreme expression in Japan, in what may well be an inadvertent pun on the double meaning of ‘Eve’: ‘Christmas Eve itself can also at times be turned from the temporal occasion of Holy Night into the very embodiment of consumerism – a young woman. “For all the Eves”, promises one ...”

“... morality. Here Hampshire is in agreement with many contemporary philosophers, while Walzer may have ordinary usage on his side. I do not believe that it matters who is ‘correct’ on this point of usage, but it is important to note the difference in order to be clear about the difference between Walzer’s and Hampshire’s positions. As I have ...”