“... dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary success to make sure that Israel’s enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US. And let’s not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of ...”

“... and danger, and of colourful, albeit often grimy, characters. Alice Hunt’s Republic follows Paul Lay’s entertaining history of Cromwell’s rule, Providence Lost, published in 2020, and Anna Keay’s acclaimed The Restless Republic (2022). It is therefore less of a stand-out than it would have been five years ago, but deserves to find many ...”

“... study falls into older traditions of critique. Like the great early 20th-century historian Paul Hazard, Brockliss wants to push the boundaries of the Enlightenment beyond the ‘little flock of philosophes’, and in particular to identify it with the intellectual phenomenon known as the ‘Republic of Letters’ – an international network of ...”

“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a lot ...”

“... would fire its long-range Scud missiles – equipped with chemical or biological warheads – at Israel, to ‘portray the war as a battle with an American-Israeli coalition and build support in the Arab world’. I heard that Saddam had elaborate and labyrinthine underground bunkers for his protection, and that it might be necessary to employ B61 Mod 11 ...”

“... elsewhere, the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground ...”

“... culture minister, who believes that Ulster Protestants are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel, has campaigned against the geological exhibits in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, whose labels seem to suggest – in a way contrived to gull the good people of Ulster into heresy – that the world was in existence long before the accepted date of its ...”

“... spending time in Syria (Mirror to Damascus, 1967), Lebanon (The Hills of Adonis, 1968), Israel and Palestine (Jerusalem, 1969) and Cyprus (Journey into Cyprus, 1975). He was in his late twenties when Mirror to Damascus came out, having worked in publishing and as a documentary filmmaker, and knew what he was doing: each of his books attests to a ...”

“... for saying this, apparently endorsed by Chomsky and certainly held by anarchists like Robert Paul Wolff, is that coercion itself – the state’s big shtick – is never justified. The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it ...”

“... by Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal and the tripartite invasion of Egypt by Israel, Britain and France that followed. The peak of Nasser’s anti-colonial prestige coincided with the Battle of Algiers (1956-57), a deadly acceleration of the Algerian struggle against French rule.Until then the Africa of Arab and Berber peoples had been ...”

“... 8.35). We were given the example of the Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, where the pastor Paul Yonggi Cho had built up a congregation of 500,000 members, through the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit. My notes for that day are full of numbers: ‘3770 verses, 4 gospels. 727 – 19 per cent! – refer to healing/rez of dead’. On Wednesday we were ...”

“... imposed to limit access to resources. This can be a territorial issue: Jones points out that Israel, which has ‘the most complete border fencing and security network in the world’, uses its defences not only for military objectives but to bar Palestinians from access to such resources as olive groves, or land on which to build houses in parts of the ...”

“... himself gained immense popularity and legitimacy in the process. But his regime lost the Sinai to Israel in 1967 and, in order to get it back, his successor, Anwar Sadat, prostrated Egypt before the United States. It has remained a depressed client state to this day. Sadat increased his own freedom of action by encouraging the army to develop its economic ...”

“... of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 state-owned companies and their 650,000 employees: he fired half a ...”

“... to be contemplated is an attack by the triple alliance of the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, with the US in the background. This brings up an awkward question about a country that has meddled in US elections far more persistently and with larger measurable effects than Russia: namely, Israel. The most important ...”