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“... The death toll in Iraq continues to rise: more than 2600 American soldiers, 113 British troops, 130 from other countries, perhaps 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And more than 70 journalists, outnumbering the 69 killed in World War Two, the 63 in Vietnam and the 17 in Korea. The risks involved mean that it is hard to ask whether journalists do a good enough job in telling us what we need to know ...”

“... Of all​ the world’s trouble spots few are more susceptible than the Middle East to being seen in terms of binary oppositions. One particularly murky dichotomy is between Sunni and Shi’a, the one accounting for 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims, the other constituting the majority in Iran and a large minority in many parts of the Gulf. Analogies we may want to reach for – Protestant/Catholic, northerner/southerner, conservative/liberal – aren’t always helpful on such slippery terrain ...”

“... I fell​ in love with double-crested cormorants twenty years ago, partly out of gratitude. I had just started watching birds, I was terrible at it, and the big black creatures – two and a half feet tall, with a wingspan of more than four feet – were easy to find, even in my field guide. Unlike the variegated wood warblers flitting from page to page deep inside the book, the cormorants lived at the front with the pelicans, and like them had rubbery skin stretching from their lower mandibles ...”

“... Somehow, the traders seem to get there first. Before the armies, before the missionaries or travellers or bureaucrats or busybodies, they arrive, in search of furs and spices, rare textiles and strange foods. To prehistoric groups whose burial sites contain items brought from a continent away, or woodsmen in pursuit of goods lying just beyond the frontier, the trader brought many other things: stories of the exotic, knowledge of the unknown, foreign songs and dress, religion, disease, inventions and slaves ...”

“... True or false? 1. Suicide bombers suffer not from a sense of having lost their place in a community but from a sense that they have failed in their quest to find a new, Westernised form of individuality. 2. Muslim fundamentalists – and born-again Muslims in families living in the West – owe their new-found religiosity more to the process of Western secularisation than to the culture they inherited from their parents ...”

“... Syria’s Alawite heartland is defined by its funerals. In Qirdaha in the mountainous Latakia province, hometown of the Assad dynasty, I watched as two police motorcycles drove up the hill, pictures of Bashar mounted on their windshields. An ambulance followed, carrying the body of a dead lieutenant colonel from state security. As the convoy passed, the men around me let off bursts of automatic fire ...”

“... Charles Rosen’s new book is about the group of composers who succeeded the great Viennese Classicists Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, and the aesthetic movement they represented. The Post-Classicists emerged for the most part during the period from the death of Beethoven (1827) to the death of Chopin (1849). A substantially expanded version of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard during 1980-1, The Romantic Generation, which follows in the path of its distinguished predecessor The Classical Style, is a remarkable amalgam of precise, brilliantly illuminating analysis, audacious generalisation, and not always satisfying – but always interesting – synthesis scattered over more than seven hundred pages of serviceable but occasionally patronising prose that takes Rosen through a generous amount of mainly instrumental and vocal music at very close range indeed ...”

“... at seven. An old lady is already in their sitting-room, looking very composed. She is called Helen Rosen – she knew Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett and stood out against McCarthy. She is the widow of a doctor who made a break-through with an operation for the deaf. She assisted her husband in his lab for thirty years, she told us, as she wasn’t allowed ...”

“... Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an ...”

“... I glimpse the potentialities of the idea. The hero, Buster, is an embryo in the womb of Sheila Rosen, a pianist. He can hear a good deal of what takes place outside the stomach-wall, and having led a number of previous lives can understand and interpret what he hears. He soon gathers that he is to be born into an unhappy family: Mrs ...”

“... that he would either quit or be fired by Obama. The opening salvo came in a blog posting by Steven Rosen, a former official of Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now under indictment for passing secrets to Israel. Freeman’s views of the Middle East, he said, ‘are what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, with which he maintains ...”

“... chorale, seems to have become emblematic of Schumann’s troublesome later style. Charles Rosen in The Romantic Generation singles it out as among the ‘few rare undeniable masterly successes’ of this period. Daverio, while regretting that our knowledge of Schumann’s final illness has had a negative influence on the reception of these works ...”

“... When pressed, people who believe in this ‘modern tradition’ will refer, as Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner do, in a discussion of the new Musée d’Orsay in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, to successive battles against ‘authority’, and will try to persuade us that Gericault (whose masterpiece was praised in the highest terms ...”

“... his office, I noticed a board on the wall with the names of the occupiers of each flat. The names Rosen and Levine jumped out at me.It was a couple of weeks before I looked up their names in the phone book and found their numbers, and a while after that before I picked up the phone.I introduced myself as Jenny Diski and explained who my parents were and which ...”

“... uniquely in the book, Murdoch calls in an ally a few years younger than herself. She uses Stanley Rosen’s essay ‘Heidegger’s Interpretation of Plato’. (Rosen, who styles himself a ‘humanities educator’, studied in Chicago during the heydey of Leo Strauss.) Other critics might happily locate Heidegger’s ...”