“... me directly. The SIS assigned me a codename – Dark Knight – for use in our correspondence (Richard Butler, Unscom’s executive chairman, was Dark Prince). The sites for Unscom inspections were originally determined by declarations made by Iraq. In the first statements it provided to the UN, in April 1991, it underestimated its holdings of chemical ...”

“... now directed against the Communists, whom he held responsible for the division of Korea. In May 1954 Moon finally founded his Unification Church. Moon has always made extreme demands on his followers: they are enjoined to give up everything on becoming members of his flock, and have to work long hours for no pay – engaging in a plethora of activities ...”

“... the first black man to break a barrier, he did not try to carry others along with him. He may have disappointed himself, too, over the decades, as he continued to insist his second novel was nearly done. Rampersad provides exhaustive details of what is portrayed as a flaw in Ellison’s psychology: his compulsive institution-joining, entering the ...”

“... only the description of the dog is given as a quotation (I’m not quite sure why; I suppose there may be spaniels who don’t look lugubrious). However, when I pursued the incident to its source in the published version of Spender’s journals, I found none of the detail of the earlier accident, merely a mention that the car-door incident ‘brought to mind ...”

“... agreement that the essential structure of all civilisations is at breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. The seer is Hannah Arendt, in the 1950 preface to The Origins of ...”

“... for taxes is the quasi-Hobbesian one succinctly expressed in the early 19th century by Richard Whately, an archbishop who moonlighted as a philosopher and political economist, when he defined taxation as ‘the revenue levied from the subject in return for the protection afforded by the Sovereign’. On this understanding, taxation is a kind of ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... friend of Dickens’s Mrs Gamp, and Thurber was a writer before he was a cartoonist); and it may be that the ‘extra’ dimension in this cartoon came about because its essential idea had first been established by another and earlier writer. Somewhere at the back of his mind Thurber was surely remembering, with profit and perhaps with gratitude, a poem ...”

“... access and information, but not so much I have to pretend I am ready to support our boys come what may. So I tell him what I think, that it is the wrong war at the wrong time, but that if I was an Iraqi, I’d be longing for the Americans to come, and hoping they wouldn’t kill me, and hoping they would leave as soon as Saddam was gone. Vernon is friendly ...”

“... conductor to be brilliant regardless of the quality of the performance he directs, the orchestra may look on him with scepticism and a weary tolerance. The relationship of conductor to players is acutely asymmetrical. Managerial and strategic power lies with the conductor. His musical will is absolute, but he is entirely dependent on the players to implement ...”

“... in belly dancing. Most scandalous of all was his debut back in Leningrad in Don Quixote on 27 May 1960. As the audience waited for the curtain to go up on the last act, Nureyev was in his dressing-room refusing to go on. The problem was the ‘lampshade’ pants he was obliged to wear. He wanted to appear in tights alone, as Western dancers did. His ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... taxes to welfare Clinton governed ‘not just to the right of Jimmy Carter, but to the right of Richard Nixon’. Against Clinton’s declaration that the era of big government is over, Krugman calls for ‘an unabashedly liberal programme of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality – a new New Deal’. There are indeed some Democrats, most ...”

“... rightly points out, even if exoplanets turn out to be exponentially plentiful in our galaxy, life may prove to be an even more exponentially improbable occurrence. The easy leap made in the early days of SETI – from stars to planets to life to intelligent life – was never more than a conjecture. So the ‘eerie silence’ – no confirmed SETI contacts ...”

“... 1940 and 1945 he turned away from nationalism and xenophobia – life in Nazi-occupied Paris may have prompted him to think again. Primer of Passions, written in Romanian during the war and published in French much later as Bréviaire des vaincus (1993), resonates with disappointment. Bidding farewell to his native country and welcoming exile and ...”