“... The two sides killed each other, as well as many civilians, and blood feuds were born. On 17 May 1999, Israelis elected Ehud Barak on the strength of his promise to reverse Ariel Sharon’s Lebanon adventure, which had by then cost around a thousand Israeli lives. Barak announced that Israel would pull out in an orderly fashion in July 2000, provided ...”

“... he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1. The standard Latin text of Catullus’ works (which may or may not include this ‘witty booklet’) is one of the slimmest volumes in the Oxford Classical Texts series, and yet this diminutive collection of ‘trifles’, as Catullus calls them, has generated enough commentary ...”

“... theological certainties and subtleties, which the experts understand and which some of them may well think consistent with their own religious positions. Conventional pieties do occasionally peep through the prose of the catalogue and the TV commentaries, where they are rather heavily underlined by John Tavener’s music for the title ...”

“... of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue of Halleck in the so-called Poet’s Corner of America which, until that day, had contained memorials only to English and Scottish writers ...”

“... discourse in his milieu even if he was unable to control events’. The letters as we have them may well have been arranged in order to shape our sense of Cicero’s persona and significance, but we also have to allow systematically for what White calls ‘the letter-writing habits of a particular Roman milieu’. Those represented in the collection are ...”

“... British imperialism may have been oversold. Anti-imperialists tend to blame it for most of the problems of the modern world; a rather smaller band of apologists credits it with spreading modernity. These views are not incompatible: either way it is seen as crucial. Most of the popular debate centres on whether it was (or is) a force for good or for ill ...”

“... as a form of art.1 The name offered both anonymity and solidarity to the people who used it. In May 1995, around seventy Luther Blissetts assembled in front of the register office in Rome in the early hours of the morning to protest against the ‘fetish of identity’ and for the right to call yourself whatever you want, whenever you want. The Luther ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from his cramped offices under the Admiralty. The surrender of the Afrikakorps in Tunisia on 13 May 1943 forced the Allies to maintain their offensive momentum by attacking the Germans somewhere in occupied Europe. But where? The tip of the Tunisian peninsula pointed straight at Sicily, only a hundred miles distant, and the island was an obvious base for ...”

“... and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a professional obligation to be ‘odd’. And if Will’s novel turns out to be a hit and makes him a celebrity, he’ll need someone around to ...”

“... if they didn’t. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq. This time Bush may be right; although, once again, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and ...”

“... the most intimately known family of the English Middle Ages. The lives of kings and princes may be more celebrated, and we may have far more records relating to the major aristocratic families, but the Paston letters supply individual voices. The correspondence extends over four generations of both men and women ...”

“... immunity had been convenient for the government of the day, and especially so for MI5 (which may also have turned a blind eye to Kim Philby’s defection in 1963), since his arrest and trial would certainly have led to a thorough investigation of British intelligence organisations, entailing drastic changes (or the expensive pretence that such changes ...”

“... the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In particular, drugs were thought to ...”

“... was of US making: a dispatch sent to the Italian police in March 2003 which claimed that Omar ‘may have travelled’ to ‘an unknown country in the Balkans’. This (vague) false trail may have encouraged the police not to take too much trouble over the investigation. The case went cold, in part because the judge then ...”