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“... of his often brilliant observations about nuclear weapons (the 1955 ‘Balance of Terror’ speech said it all) is that he deplored them more than most people, as the final and complete ruination not just of mere boring peace, but of the splendid (non-nuclear) warfare he had known and loved so well – for not even Churchill foresaw the emergence of the ...”

“... Party and were going to meetings twice a week and putting up posters. They had joined, they said, because they were demanding rights for homosexuals and believed that the socialists would deliver these rights. Everyone should join, they said, there were not just going to be better wages and freedom of expression and ...”

“... Israel on the eve of the Six-Day War. ‘For reasons that we still cannot know for certain,’ Edward Said would lament, ‘Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism. Whether that was because he was afraid of seeming antisemitic, or because he felt guilt about the Holocaust, or because he allowed himself no deep appreciation of ...”

“... but he wrote only in French and had an ambivalent relationship with Creole (writing in Creole, he said, ‘is a bit like cutting yourself off from the rest of the world’). He was associated with communist and socialist politics and with African and Third World liberation, but he was also a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure who used arcane and ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... that lifted and swayed like a pleated skirt – but someone in the van persuaded me to hand it up, said it would be perfectly safe, I’d get it back in a minute.There was a lot of kerfuffle unloading the van and carrying all the stuff down the long, narrow path that led back from the street into a garden in the middle of which, like a secret, sat the little ...”

“... with much literary ignorance. They confuse two very different masters – Lewis Carroll with Edward Lear – and ascribe that ridiculous but famous play What Every Woman Knows to James Bourke! On the credit side, they show real understanding of the man’s character, especially in his later years, and commendably recognise one of the finest deeds of his ...”

“... Edward James​ was charming, eccentric, generous and immensely wealthy. For most of his life, his greatest talent was placing himself in interesting situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ...”

“... Edward Hopper languished into his forties as a commercial illustrator. He got his first break thanks to a boost from a fellow artist called Josephine Verstille Nivison, who in the fall of 1923 got the Brooklyn Museum to include him in a group show to which she had been invited to contribute. He married her the following year ...”

“... she seems at last to become her own woman – ‘herself a final form of company discovered’. Edward Said calls exile (the palpable kind) an ‘unhealable rift between a human being and a native place’, and Hilda Bernstein has chosen the title of her book with this in mind. It contains roughly a hundred testimonies by South African exiles. From the ...”

“... These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to Western imperialism in modern times ...”

“... for ending the occupation and achieving self-determination. This is a long-standing weakness, as Edward Said often argued in these pages. It dates back to the Mandate era, when the Palestinians, unlike many other Arab national movements of the same period, failed to build up the centralised institutions of a para-state, or to take control of the ...”

“... podcast The Daily, spoke to two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. ‘So, Abdallah,’ Tavernise said to Abdallah Hasaneen, a resident of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, who was only able to get a signal from his balcony, ‘we’ve been talking about all of the air strikes that have been happening since last Saturday, and of course the thing that happened ...”

“... the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although Zionist leaders could turn these anti-semitic notions to their own ends, the ...”

“... What Chakrabarty wants to do with ‘Europe’, then, is in some ways similar to what Edward Said did with the ‘Orient’: to fashion a subversive genealogy. But instead of Said’s relentless polemic, Chakrabarty’s book features critique and self-criticism in equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the ...”