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“... unfortunate.’ The US military holds many rounds of aptitude tests each year. There are few other means available to students who want to study overseas, and even then the army pays only for approved courses. Enlisting also means your flight off the island is paid for – a serious consideration for many young people. A ...”

“... people’ have neither freedom of movement nor freedom of speech. For if freedom of speech means anything it must mean the right to be heard, to matter. That leaves those with the opportunity to be heard and the freedom to travel with a responsibility to decide: who are they speaking with and for? A third of Britain is poor, and yet the voice of the ...”

“... texts which might ‘by reason of their elegance and quality of style be permitted, but by no means read to children’. Early Modern pornographers were quick to exploit the implications of this clause, passing off their works as imitations of classic sources. ‘I simply follow in the footsteps of the Ovids and Virgils of this world,’ declared Antonio ...”

“... of executive coercion is the ability to hire and fire ministers. Maybe that’s what Raab means: he will purge anyone who stands in his way. But again, from the beginning of her premiership (when she culled Osborne and Gove) to its dying days (when she threw Williamson to the wolves), May was hardly a reluctant wielder of the axe. She also lost more ...”

“... Edison continues, in Trump mode, ‘which will destroy it when pressed.’ Edison was by no means a bad choice as referee, given his enthusiasm for electricity’s destructive potential. The Edison Manufacturing Company was responsible for one of the most disgusting documentary films ever made, Electrocuting an Elephant (1903). Still, Edison pales ...”

“... symbolically with colour’. ‘Only symbolically’ goes a little further than Baldwin needs. It means, as he later makes clear, ‘politically’: ‘Colour is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.’ A white liberal would say the same, but then, I take it, so would Nelson Mandela. The difference is in the intensity with which the ...”

“... iconically iconic. It isn’t just that when we talk about Garbo we’re talking about what it means to be talked about – to the extent that the person she was and the films she made now seem almost beside the point. It is rather that, to judge by the tone of much of the commentary, the person and the films were never the point in the first place. In its ...”

“... the mood took him, an advocate of cool. In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a ‘new secular virtue’ – the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness retuned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it’s a ...”

“... suggests, Dickens’s artfulness is often an almost impudent trickery.’ To illustrate what he means by artfulness amounting to trickery, Mullan draws on a rather different scene in Oliver Twist, in which Fagin, the master thief, teaches Charley Bates and the Artful Dodger how to pick pockets. Fagin plays the part of an elderly window-shopper whom the boys ...”

“... by the amount it helps to raise for these causes. But this is no justification at all. No means of raising revenue can be justified simply by pointing to the amount of money raised for some or other cause unless that cause is unequivocally good. And if the cause is unequivocally good, then any means of raising the ...”

“... Irish Catholic community, Dr O’Brien admits to ‘a certain atavistic understanding of what it means to belong to a stigmatised people’. The connections between Jews and Irish Catholics – the ‘experiences of oppression and stigmatisation’ – ‘have in fact been important to me, in approaching this subject, and writing this book’. As a ...”

“... again and again in these statements, but whereas for the Archbishop, or the Pope, ‘the people’ means all Catholics taken together, for the People’s Church it means the poor and oppressed, and excludes the rich. The recalcitrant priests believe they are engaged not merely in a local struggle against the Archbishop, but ...”

“... difficult to enforce by mere codes of dress and manners’. The idea of reputation, a means of social positioning that went beyond (and indeed could counter) the immovabilities of birth, was ‘at the heart of the Enlightenment’s attempts to understand what, in the late 18th century, it meant to be modern’. Following an altercation at his ...”

“... mounted, however, some soldiers worried about Soviet retaliation: ‘The freedom of the people means death for us. Now our luck is not worth much anymore.’ Other Tatars fought with the partisans, even though most commanders made no secret of their anti-Muslim feelings. Towards the end of the occupation, Tatar relations with the Germans cooled. SS and ...”

“... to use Kant’s term, of ‘boundlessness’ (Grenzenlosigkeit). I think this is what Serra means when he speaks of the ‘openness’ of a work. It is a classic post-minimalist paradox. Your response, your action creates the conditions for the experience of sublimity. Yet faced with the grandeur of the Sublime you can no longer think, let alone ...”