“... the PLO. And in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, the American Jewish community underwent what Norman Podhoretz called a ‘complete Zionisation’. As Joshua Leifer argues in his new book, Tablets Shattered, the Jewish establishment became increasingly ‘particularist, their rhetoric blunter in its defence of Jewish self-interest’. That establishment ...”

“... been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to be ...”

“... habit of practical philanthropy which was both a virtue and an indulgence for someone who found Edward Carpenter’s ‘ideal of comradeship among simple honest ordinary lives’ so attractive. He left Cambridge and began to lecture and teach. He was inspired, as Crawford puts it, by ‘a mixture of angry youthful idealism and of upper-class notions of duty ...”

“... Samuel (whom Segev describes as a ‘double agent’) to liaise with the Zionist Commission and Norman Bentwich as Attorney-General. Weizmann persuaded Balfour, Samuel and Churchill to transfer Colonel Edmund Vivian Gabriel, who was responsible for the military budget. Gabriel’s dismissal prompted Curzon, who had become Foreign Secretary, to ...”

“... have survived since at least the 15th century, a relic still of a ceremony that went out under Edward VI, is as vivid and evocative as any screen or wall-painting (though there are those too). Of course Puddletown figures in Hardy’s history and there are names on the war memorial – Sparks, for instance – of his cousins and relatives, the church ...”

“... mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social ...”

“... occur when the humour is somewhat inadvertent. There is a hilarious discussion of the manliness of Edward Said, in which the set-piece comes when Hitchens’s wife, Carol, has her bag stolen during a lunch with the extremely dapper Said. Said immediately rose to the occasion. Did he chase down the thieves, or summon the cops? No. He took her shopping. At ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... is a close similarity between Wordsworth’s manifesto in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Edward Marsh introducing the first Georgian anthology in 1912 with the statement that ‘English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ The difference is that Wordsworth really was heralding a new era of sensibility, as Ezra Pound was to do ...”

“... problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that ...”

“... wanted to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam and China. In mid-1965, the legendary Major-General Edward Lansdale – ‘legendary’ for having thoroughly militarised the Philippine Government in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’ – was asked to return to Vietnam as special assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. After hearing Lansdale talk in ...”

“... had eaten into union membership and self-confidence. In late 1981 she made her move, appointing Norman Tebbit as employment secretary. Tebbit believed, as many Conservatives always have, that unions should be subservient organisations: ‘Their prime role,’ he lectured Len Murray, the general secretary of the TUC, in 1983, ‘should be to help improve the ...”

“... Orchestra (1939) might slot seamlessly into a concert programme of English string pieces like Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings and Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, but by the time of his third opera, The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970, Tippett was using an electric guitar, keyboard and drum kit to pump the liberating ...”

“... and that Lois herself had been a high-school supporter of the Socialist Party of America under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a ...”