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“... belligerati, who ignore the more informed analyses of Manningham-Buller or the former CIA officer Robert Baer. If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily ...”

“... Literary imagination here reconfigures the territory by reviving memories of this site or that. Robert Macfarlane has pointed out that the verb ‘to write’ refers, via the old English Writan, to a kind of incisive track-making. Thus one would originally ‘write’ by drawing a point across a surface of wood, stone or earth: by furrowing a track. In ...”

“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... said that sexual jealousy was the next great obstacle before mankind, demanding a heroic culture-conquest. (It is a bit pathetic that they thought nothing worse would crop up.) Joyce insisted at one point, when the book was newly out, that it had no moral ‘and not one serious line in it’, but this was a claim to be an artist, usual among Ibsenites: he ...”

“... Treatise of Government is ‘slavery’, a fate to which Locke thought the political theory of Sir Robert Filmer condemned everyone except monarchs. Still, Machiavelli’s influence on the American revolutionaries is plain. His description in the Discourses, memorable in the way of oxymorons, of the way the tribunate made the Roman republic ‘more ...”

“... Le Roy Ladurie, whose Times of Feast, Times of Famine was published in 1971. A decade later, Robert Rotberg and Theodore Rabb published a trailblazing volume of essays, Climate and History, their mission to explore ‘an exciting frontier for reading and research’. Recently, the geologist Gifford Miller and his team at the University of ...”

“... periodically reverts to a hirsute beast in Virginie Despentes’s torrid first-person rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson (its title winningly translated as ‘Hairs on Me’). The creatures are present because short stories make it their business to speculate about an otherness they do not have time to investigate, and animals are far-reaching analogies. They ...”

“... Before making up his mind, Obama commissioned a report on the history of US covert operations. Robert Malley, then Obama’s Middle East adviser and now President Biden’s negotiator with Iran, read the CIA’s classified report. It was, he told me in 2019, a litany of failure. ‘I think there were one or two, out of I don’t know how many tens of ...”

“... feels at causing the pains of childbirth and the responsibility England shrugs off for the Tudor conquest, 1798 and the legacy of Loyalist extremism. Riven by inconsistencies, the poem struggles to yoke the personal to the political by stacking up double entendres about invaders who ‘came’ among the ‘mounds and ring-forts’ of Ireland/Mrs Heaney and ...”

“... us to the world also conceal our relationship to it. Some would say that’s just as well. ‘The conquest of the earth,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’ Today Congo – which was described as a ‘geological scandal’ after copper was discovered in Katanga in 1892 – accounts for less than 1 per cent of the ...”

“... and the Hejaz might well be returned to the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan, its rulers before the conquest by Ibn Saud in 1924; or, to put it differently, the British imperial programme of 1919 would be resurrected (though, if the Hashemites have any sense, they would reject what would without question be a long-term death sentence). Beyond lies China. When ...”

“... not even the German war of annihilation against Russia, comes up to ancient standards. After their conquest of Melos, as Thucydides tells us, the Athenians executed all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery. Athens then repopulated the island with its own. The biblical Hebrews treated the various peoples of the land of Canaan that they ...”

“... the elite-based forms of inequality, the encroachment of inheritance and property, the wars of conquest with their in-built drive to the oppression of conquered peoples. Militarism – she took the Incas and Sparta as her examples – was the key to exploitation, a form of foundational violence; hence her revulsion at Germany’s slide into militarism and ...”

“... mediocre plays which took up most of his time and earned much of his money: heroic tragedies (The Conquest of Granada, Aureng-Zebe), tragicomedies (Marriage à la Mode) and farce (An Evening’s Love); and many, many prologues and epilogues to other people’s plays as well as his own. Finally, there are the volumes of accompanying criticism (Of Dramatic ...”