“... which six Syrian MiGs were shot down; in a further humiliation, IDF jets flew over Damascus. On 12 May, Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff, threatened to invade Syria. An Israeli-Syrian war looked imminent. The following day, Nasser received intelligence from the Soviets that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border. This wasn’t true, but the Syrians ...”

“... since these are not finite possessions but transferable gifts that can grow and change. The ego may be founded on wave upon wave of reactions and violences of which it is only partially aware, but it is also founded on words, and words can be the communicants of gentle relationships between people and nations as well as violent ones. You might feel ...”

“... of the Rosetta Stone. The number of them hints at a BM merchandising frenzy: for sale, and I may have miscounted, are a mug, a mouse-mat, a ceramic tile, a tie, a teacloth, a scarf, a T-shirt and two sizes of replica, all of them stamped with a presumably random excerpt from the Stone’s inscriptions. It’s long been the received wisdom locally that ...”

“... In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else ...”

“... are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of ...”

“... I’ll use it – measuring everything that exists I can compare with Zeus nothing except Zeus. May he take this weight from my heart … Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom when he laid down this law:By suffering we learn … ‘Whoever Zeus is’; ‘I can/compare with Zeus nothing/except Zeus.’ Elsewhere the same chorus says, ‘Zeus acts as Zeus ...”

“... a zoophile on every committee won’t bring the New Jerusalem any closer. Assimilating more people may be a way of extending the sway of the system, not of transforming it. Anyway, when it comes to allowing serial child abusers to become schoolteachers, Sam Goldwyn’s legendary cry of ‘Include me out!’ has a point. Who decides who is to be included? And ...”

“... us to make the right predictions, and none of the other stances would work so well. Sceptics may (and do) deny this fact, but here is a small-scale demonstration of how the intentional stance appears to be built into our modes of understanding. Suppose I tell you: ‘When Alice found Bill in bed with Christine, she took the ring off her finger and flung ...”

“... of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, writes that ‘Iraqis may be deeply divided along sectarian, ethnic, tribal and factional lines,’ but they nevertheless ‘have a national consciousness, a great deal of national pride, and they do not want to be “occupied” or have a US presence any longer than ...”

“... Alliance, when it was subsequently faced with ostensibly less intractable difficulties. Now that David Owen’s ‘continuing SDP’ has gone out of business, some gullible newspapers have written as though the party that was launched nine years ago had sunk with all hands aboard. In fact, of course, constitutionally and numerically, the real continuing SDP ...”

“... the ‘progress’, which were sometimes described as comic history painting, and which may have contained the implication that the commercial England of the mid-18th century was not a place in which ideal history painting in the Italian manner could flourish – and that this was a cause for congratulation, not regret. What the English needed was ...”

“... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...”

“... Europe and extends imperfectly into France and northern Italy. We are also describing an era which may be ending. Certainly full employment is no more. And Keynesianism is out of fashion. At the same time, there is in most countries, not merely in Britain, a more specific ‘crisis of the Welfare State’. This ‘crisis’ – the quotation-marks are to ...”

“... beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the distressed. Sterne assured his readers that his purpose in A Sentimental Journey (1768) ‘was to teach us to love the world and our fellow ...”

“... to the category of purely inventive or observant novelists, like Balzac or Dickens (setting aside David Copperfield). Plot invention, in particular, was never his forte: Le Rouge et le Noir derived from two separate causes célèbres, La Chartreuse from an untrustworthy 16th-century account of the youthful escapades of Pope Paul III, and Lucien Leuwen was ...”