“... Royal Court. Isabelle Torrance insists on tragic drama’s deep religious roots. The word tragedy means ‘goat song’, and although we don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes ...”

“... Hamas controlled the zakat committees the HLF used and that by distributing humanitarian aid by means of those committees, the HLF had helped Hamas win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Palestinian people. None of the seven committees identified as suspect by the prosecution had ever been proscribed as a terrorist organisation and no one connected with them ...”

“... excuse for befogging the reader. Montaillou was, last October, the subject of an attack by David Herlihy in Social History on the grounds of inaccurate handling of its source material. The specific accusation was of mistranslation from the Latin, and of the irrelevant introduction of material about incidents elsewhere. There is also the problem of ...”

“... have big ideas.’ The old Clause IV, a plainly expressed commitment to common ownership of the means of production, is replaced by an unctuous formula which promises everything and nothing at the same time. The shift of language disguises a U-turn in political direction. The demand for a publicly directed economy becomes a demand for a ‘dynamic ...”

“... Killer. A white man scalped. A white man disappeared, a white boy kidnapped. It was Biblical, David v. Goliath. But Wilson was disturbed by that.’ It’s a way of writing that recalls the staccato beat of three-dot journalism, and Alexie’s reliance on it suggests that he is trying to put everything simply and clearly, so that readers don’t make the ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...”

“... even if (as I suggested a few weeks ago) there was not then the degree of national consensus which David Marquand, in The Unprincipled Society, would have us believe, there was at any rate full employment, or as near to it as a liberal-democratic capitalist society is ever going to get. But just as, in the Thirties, the failure of the previous Labour ...”

“... his backdrop. In single scenes in Prêt-à-Porter, he creates an impression of physical depth by means of overlapping dialogue; over many scenes, by interweaving stories in a fugue-like manner, he creates a secondary, almost synaesthetic effect of stillness and contemplation. Other directors, notably Welles, have used overlapping or polyphonic dialogue, but ...”

“... by the Moreel triptych and some thirty more works, was classed along with Van Eyck and Gerard David as the great Flemish primitive. On that occasion his particular Flemish religiosity (again with the less-than-convincing comparison to Fra Angelico) was emphasised. On the one hand, the very model of a Flemish primitive master; on the other, the German ...”

“... Gene Kelly in his tribute to Gene Kelly, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. If they admired him it means that there is always room for frivolity, and I warm to the idea that the French New Wave (now associated with what is archetypally arty and intense) actually thought the whole thing was a bowl of technicolour cherries. However, two things suggest that the ...”

“... right to feel he is not a victim of anything other than nature. Hiroshima as a focus for thought means the unthinkable could always happen, has already happened. The task for the imagination (for the Japanese writer, as Oë says) is neither to tame nor to submit to the horror, but to bring its combined enormity and historicity to light, to find disaster’s ...”

“... the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in ...”

“... grow faster than they could be paid off. Wilkes regarded the Bill of Rights Society solely as the means to his own personal solvency and political fame, but Horne, who dominated it during Wilkes’s enforced absence, voiced the opinion of those members who wished to make it a radical organisation. A quarrel between the two became inevitable after Wilkes’s ...”

“... he was 45 and she was 25. Cavendish was the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a cousin of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from ...”