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“... regulators who looked incompetent. Branson’s strategy, his way of portraying himself as a plucky David in a world of corporate Goliaths doesn’t always work. Sometimes the charade is too transparent. Following the failed prosecution, BA turned its attention to alliances and takeovers to shore up its position, first with American Airlines, then Iberia, then ...”

“... all the way to the extreme conclusion – that the mind contributes everything – this is by no means a necessary consummation. Kant himself did not go so far. But Berkeley based his idealism on the consideration of sense-perception, and if he had stopped half-way, with Galileo or Locke, and left some of the properties of things outside the mind, he would ...”

“... and Gloucester were called to see the body and viewed it ‘superficially’, but this probably means that they couldn’t examine how the king died, not that they couldn’t see his face. It is hard to imagine a quicker way of adding to the rumours that the king was alive than for large numbers of people to see a corpse with the face covered up. That ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... the glass. In Tennessee, he noted that the people had elected to Congress ‘an individual called David Crockett, who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent … his whole life in the woods’. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville also found America ‘a most interesting and instructive country to ...”

“... linguistic content, and then use that decoded content as the basis for inferring what the speaker means to communicate. It is the second process, inference, which completes the act of communication. The same must be true of the ‘language’ of gesture. If we want to understand what someone means by standing with his arm ...”

“... and its impact on Europe, largely, though not entirely, through the work of archaeologists. David Wilson, Director of the British Museum, is among the most distinguished of these, and the exhibition which he and his pupils have mounted there (until 20 July) quite properly commemorates their achievement and that of their Scandinavian colleagues. This, in ...”

“... sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes ...”

“... sacrificed the Lusitania to draw the United States into the war. Both Diana Preston and David Ramsay deal briskly and effectively with this. Churchill and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, were preoccupied with the escalating political crisis over Gallipoli. The absence of British naval escorts for the Lusitania in the war zone reflected the ...”

“... societies, whether as hunters or breeders, have to be attentive to seasons.) Seasonal means solar, and the Hebrew calendar was in fact a lunisolar calendar, as was the Chinese. Young cites Boorstin on this point, but Boorstin gets it right. (There is also one howler that deserves an erratum slip: on page 200 we learn of a book on feudalism by that ...”

“... than non-Labour voters. The terminology of the ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ means no more to them; and if it did, they would be as likely to vote for a ‘centre’ party in preference to a party of the ‘left’. If the Bennite neo-Marxists are on the ‘left’ of the political spectrum and the Thatcherite neo-liberals on the ...”

“... seem.’ How long can she keep up the versatility unrebuked? Sanders gave a rough idea of what he means by ‘establishment’ in a debate on 12 February when he took up Hillary Clinton’s laudatory review of the latest book by Henry Kissinger. ‘I happen to believe,’ he said, ‘that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in ...”

“... the IPL is cricket designed to favour big-hitting batsmen; bowlers are just cannon fodder, which means they can’t command the big bucks, no matter how good they are. The prevailing cricketing order is biased in Pietersen’s favour while he remains convinced that it’s conspiring against him. Twitter feeds his self-regard and his sense of ...”

“... Ithaca for twenty years whose fidelity Odysseus tests on his return. Marrying money, either as a means of achieving worldly success or as a sign that you have already arrived at it, and adultery, the failure to live happily ever after, both speak to the centrality of marriage and of the relationship of love to property – where a wife is indeed part of the ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”