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“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?’ The old philosophers thought not, but Richard Gregory and subsequent workers have told more complex stories about recovery from blindness. We do not need philosophers to become engrossed. The one non-spiritual goal of Christ’s ministry was the curing of blindness, and every evangelist describes ...”

“... classics would continue to mark much of the scientific project throughout the long modernity which may or may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the ...”

“... give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of them is better than any other. This claim may be founded, as in Larmore, on a belief that there are many valuable conceptions of the good, or, as in Barry, on moral scepticism; each infers that no non-neutral state is justified, and assumes that the value-systems in question have equal value, or at least ...”

“... of historical detection on this scale from which they are not exempt. A fresh and inquisitive eye may on occasion observe something which those more familiar with a subject have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it ...”

“... us firmly in narrating rather than narrated time. And of course destiny itself, whatever else it may be, is always a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and ...”

“... most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the media, appears to have been mistaken. A less obvious consequence of this mistake has been its role in strengthening the North’s ...”

“... from his fellow MPs (which he would have been unable to do), and three days after Theresa May had become prime minister. When I arrived at Broadcasting House for the start of the march, a few hundred people were gathered around a speaker from the UK wing of Black Lives Matter, orating into a megaphone. There were people selling the papers you always ...”

“... was a word Pevsner relished.Reilly’s galère left out a number of artists of whose existence he may have been unaware, just as they may have been unaware of each other. Patrick Abercrombie mentioned some of them in the introduction to his Book of the Modern House (1939): ‘Mackintosh with his unrestrained fantasy in ...”

“... Shawcross concentrated on international intervention, from the American bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to the uses of international aid and sanctions during the Vietnamese occupation. Martin, on the other hand, has spent her career dissecting Cambodian society from within, always using a French historical framework. When she ...”

“... canonical works of black male autobiography that have surely shaped Gates’s political thinking, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Colored People is not an angry, still less an incendiary work; its predominant tone is nostalgic and ...”

“... in us.’ No folie de grandeur here, only an obsessive, mournful modesty: what we didn’t betray may not have been there anyway. Acrimony has a fine epigraph from Rilke, all about the unmeasured or the disproportionate, and how it piles up and hurls itself at us (‘so sehr ist überall das Ungemässe / und häuft sich an und stürzt sich uns ...”

“... his generation’ and terms like ‘Don Quixote’ have become labels almost universally used. He may be right, but it is worth remarking that Orwell’s friends took a different view of the obituary at the time. Almost every admiring phrase seems to contain its implicit qualification, so that Orwell was not just the conscience but the wintry conscience of ...”

“... of former colleagues around to point out mis-statements or lacunae. Mind you, this convention may be changing: one can imagine the kind of history of the Times of the 1980s Rupert Murdoch would be likely to commission, or pass. It is hard to see him frightened by the prospect of hostile reviews: ‘Murdoch Loses Sleep over Bias ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”