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“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”

“... hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine what the actions of the Western powers in relation to Africa and Asia, and the Arab world in particular, are doing to democratic principles and the idea of the rule of law. The Afghans who rebelled against the Communist regimes of Noor Mohammed Taraki, Hafizullah Amin and the Soviet-backed ...”

“... a source of European if not global war? It seems unlikely: unlikely, that is, so long as outside powers do not try to exploit these tensions in their own interests. A lively imagination could dream up alarming and not impossible scenarios: a chauvinistic Polish government exploiting anti-German sentiment to create national unity; Poland supporting Ukrainian ...”

“... Another says that we see in Mabuse ‘the ultimately unbearable face of the anarchistic powers of capital’. The Nazis were legally in power, and Goebbels didn’t want people to see a film about toppling governments, or toppling the very idea of government.I need to explain why I (and others) think the film is anti-authoritarian, or authoritarian ...”

“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... stuck to the party line of perceiving the war as a necessary and welcome clash between imperialist powers: as communists linked with Moscow, the Partisans had to look on Germany as a nominal non-aggressor as long as the Nazi-Soviet Pact held. It was only when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 that their position became free of ambiguity. But by then they ...”

“... Middle England by a Home Secretary who does not accept the need to preserve a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of defendants. It signals that those accused of crime do not deserve our protection. The Bill is 374 pages long and its stated aim is ‘the rebalancing of the criminal justice system in favour of victims, witnesses and ...”

“... that their campaign in response to the Armenian atrocities of 1894-96 was an invitation to other powers to try once more to carve up the Ottoman Empire. His main concern was to educate Liberals to accept the reality of British power in the Nile valley and Eastern Africa. The Gladstonians had never confronted the consequences of their own occupation of Egypt ...”

“... that was the question of standards. Leavis’s talent as a critic came precisely from his rigorous powers of selection. They were reasoned, though they might seem arbitrary, and they had the salutary effect of making the reader ask himself just what it was that was good or bad about a work of art. Priestley did not want to ask that question. For him, as he ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this design work as means to a moral end. A recent study by Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England (1999), dubs him a ‘medieval Modernist’: by which is meant that Pick regarded the purpose of design, and indeed the whole working of the Underground, in the utopian tradition of Ruskin, Morris and Ebenezer ...”

“... The camp, death, destruction become madhouse normality for him. Suffering bestows prophetic powers (the maimed seer is a recurring figure in Ballard’s fiction): in visions of terrible incandescence, Jim foresees American firebombing of Japan, the atomic destruction of Nagasaki, and – ultimately – World War Three. In clinical terms, ‘real’ war ...”

“... has brought more professional skill to the debasement of British public life than you,’ Michael Heseltine recently taunted Mandelson, who beamed back appreciatively. Indeed, so fixed has Mandelson become in the political imagination as Tony Blair’s Rasputin and High Priest of Spin that he is sometimes still dismissed as a bit of a cartoon ...”

“... to be fed up with the Democrats’ inability to get bills through Congress.In What It Took to Win, Michael Kazin traces the history over the past two centuries of what he calls ‘the oldest mass party in the world’. Kazin has been engaged with Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John ...”

“... now two, to live with my aunt in Essex. After leaving Patrick, I went to live with a writer called Michael Alexander who took me to Afghanistan. Several ‘engagements’ (author’s inverted commas) on and she is living with Johnnie, but he wanted a child of his own before Patrick returned to live with them. So ‘when my aunt brought Patrick to the London ...”