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“... or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on the imminent outbreak of another were shortening by the day. The film takes from the ...”

“... Last July David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s alleged participation in acts of torture and rendition in the years since 9/11, though he also said that it wouldn’t begin until the current round of civil lawsuits had been resolved. The emphasis, he implied, would be on Britain’s role in condoning or assisting foreign agencies rather than on our own independent behaviour ...”

“... picture of it from a 1998 thriller called Enemy of the State. A lawyer (Will Smith), swept up by mistake into the system of total surveillance, suddenly finds his life turned upside down, his family watched and harassed, his livelihood taken from him and the records of his conduct altered and criminalised. He is saved ...”

“... major themes. In October 2012, the secretary of defence, Leon Panetta, raised the stakes further by declaring that the outcome of a concerted attack on key US systems and networks ‘could be a cyber Pearl Harbor’. Cyber-warfare was now assumed to pose a greater threat to national security than terrorism. In May ...”

“... There is some competition to be the person who inspired the slogan of Occupy Wall Street: ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ Joseph Stiglitz thinks it might be him, on the back of an article he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2011 entitled: ‘Of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent ...”

“... the pitch. He reports Blair telling Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, back in 2007: ‘I learned by bitter experience during ten years as prime minister the problems of getting the government machine to deliver what I wanted. I created a Delivery Unit, and that was a great success. It transformed everything. I want to bring that success to Africa.’ Or as ...”

“... from Marber, Pinter, Osborne and Coward to Jonson and Shakespeare. And if you leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs of drying up: Irish writers, whether resident in England or ...”

“... the civic sphere are increasingly common in the United States, even among liberal democrats stung by accusations of secularist bias. The practical meaning of the separation of church and state has been contested since its enactment in the Bill of Rights. At what point does the First Amendment’s guarantee of the ‘free exercise’ of religion run foul of ...”

“... He described the refugees as people ‘who have vegetated on UN crumbs for five years, ignored by a world concerned elsewhere’, and wrote of ‘babies [who] sleep tight on their bellies to ease hunger pains’.Sparks had lots of readers. While he was never retained by the more prestigious outlets of the day – the New ...”

“... In its salad days, late last century, the first wave of social anthropologists, headed by Tylor and Frazer, sat firmly in armchairs, speculated grandly and wildly on the strength of second-hand reports from missionaries and travellers, and wrote for a lay readership in works of captivating prose. Then came Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, total immersion in single exotic cultures and increasingly unreadable monographs addressed to fellow-professionals ...”

“... does go on. The literary pages of the newspapers and more widely read journals are characterised by wall-to-wall reviewing. The review, consequently, is the most popular instrument we have for organising and distributing the production of ideas, for thinking about thinking (meta-discourse). The literary pages include essays, short stories and poems as well ...”

“... almost impossible to combine accuracy and accessibility. The technicalities of philosophy may not be as great as those of science, but they are enough to put much of what is written beyond the reach of most people. Even etnics, which touches our lives more closely than any other branch of philosophy, is now developing formidable intricacies, and in theory of ...”

“... needed an administration of almost limitless power and quite exceptional stupidity. Then he could be happy, indulging in the lethal, jugulating kind of journalism at which he excels. Of course he would have found some agreeable targets if he had stayed in Britain, but fewer and perhaps less worthy of his envenomed pen. As these essays indicate, he is much ...”

“... out that he has the necessary qualifications for guru status, in that his writings have tended to be cross-disciplinary, obscure and fairly opaque. Yet his work has recently taken on a new clarity and, moreover, he has acknowledged that in his previous studies he had missed an important explanatory variable – namely, ‘power’. In essence, Foucault now ...”

“... school, right there on national television. He was improving the state of the union, person by person. Something like the ‘sovereign’s touch’. This interlude, and several others that added half an hour to the speech, were reminiscent of two TV shows from the 1950s, Queen for a Day and This Is Your Life. An applause meter would elect as ...”