“... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...”

“... a Mod, a hippy and a Buddhist; he’d called himself Davie Jones, David Jay and David Bowie (after Richard Widmark’s portrayal of Jim Bowie in The Alamo, though he pronounces it the southern English way, the first syllable rhyming with ‘snow’ rather than ‘shoe’ or ‘cow’). Whatever it took. One of the things Trynka’s biography makes clear is ...”

“... a whirling dervish, she lost the thread of one existence and found another.’ It’s as if Sir Richard Burton had set out to write a Mills and Boon romance. Brick Lane truly comes alive only when its male characters, particularly the older ones, enter the fray. This isn’t just because they are more gabby and engaged, less likely to be sitting at home ...”

“... Did the United States invade Iraq with this objective in mind? The leader of the study group was Richard Perle, who became head – now, after press disclosure of a conflict of interest, he is a mere member – of the Defense Policy Board under Donald Rumsfeld. Another member of the study group was Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for ...”

“... inequalities we have presented may have been shocking.’ In fact, no one who takes the trouble to read this report is liable to be shocked, especially if, as is likely, they have paid attention to the discussion of recent studies such as Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Unjust Rewards (2008) or Kate Pickett and ...”

“... reality.’ The ‘theory’ he has in mind was developed in the early 1990s by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others at the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), calling for the US to increase military spending and to target rogue states (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) pre-emptively, as well as to develop missile defence and a new generation of ...”

“... the entry code. It’s as if you’ve been shoved onstage, without lines, in a play you’ve never read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All ...”

“... two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was trying to get to know.’ He read Marx and Marcuse to impress a ‘long-legged socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy ...”

“... you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play is at full ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”

“... to see in texts ‘exactly what they want to find’. Literary historians, Malcolm claims, read too much into the satirical trope of the roué’s debauched progress from whore to catamite to goat, or inflate the presence of same-sex desire in Elizabethan theatre, or cynically rebrand innocuous texts ‘on the basis of little more than word ...”

“... a pair of girlish Mary Janes on his feet. There’s no way that anyone who knew Warhol could have read the painting as anything other than a brazen self-portrait by an unrepentant homosexual, the pinky finger up his nose being a stand-in for a middle finger raised in general defiance.After art school, Warhol moved to New York and found work as an ...”

“... did not intend the city’s siege but had ‘bumbled into it’. Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that ‘the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the programme.’ Far from just changing his mind from one week to the ...”

“... The third was written in April 1895, possibly on the last day of Queensberry’s trial, and read: ‘Dear Constance, Allow no one to enter my bedroom or sittingroom – except servants – today. See no one but your friends. Ever yours Oscar.’ Wilde had wanted to stay in London for all the rehearsals of The Importance of Being Earnest, but had, on ...”