“... the morning’s savagery. As a novice freelance among legendary correspondents from the world’s major newspapers, wire services and television networks, I knew my place: listen, observe and never pontificate to elders scarred from wars in Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Suez, Belgian Congo, Indochina, Algeria and a dozen other colonial battlegrounds familiar to ...”

“... dumb activities in this dumb working-class school about the dumbest was shop: Elvis Presley’s major.’ Nor does Goldman intend that Elvis’s friends should do him credit. Here is a verbal snapshot of ‘lifelong friend and companion, Red West. Red is a senior at the time, a tough, aggressive, football-playing poor boy, whose ribs are visibly deformed ...”

“... loomed large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel ...”

“... journalism, universality is mocked. White complains that minor gay art is called ‘gay’ while major gay art is called ‘classic’ or ‘canonical’. There is muttering against ‘the bourgeois recuperation of all dissident literatures (and of gay literature in particular) through an appeal to universalism ... At this point it might be worth mentioning ...”

“... the midst of life we are in employment.’ Or this of his time at Sydney University: ‘a major in English made one a minor Englishman.’ He is clever, too, at distancing himself wryly from modern technology, as in his line about computers failing to take over the work of translators because they insisted on reading ‘out of sight, out of mind’ as ...”

“... about the size and capability of the enemy forces. A day or two before the ‘invasion’, Sir John Glubb informed Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, that the Zionists had 65,000 trained men. Azzam was surprised by this but replied: ‘I expect it will be all right. I have arranged to get up seven hundred men from Libya.’ On being asked ...”

“... of Nations.’ Disillusionment with Versailles, and the revulsion against nationalism, were the major reasons for the decline in Mazzini’s reputation, particularly in the English-speaking world. It cannot be denied that the idea of the ‘national mission’ lends itself to dangerous uses, and that Mazzini did not resist the temptation to assign Italy a ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... representative, ‘we cannot attack; the Jews might attack us in turn.’ In his memoirs, Sir John Glubb tells a rather similar anecdote. When the first independent Syrian government was formed after the 1939-45 war, the President asked for an estimate of the cost of a tank regiment. A British officer included a sum for a workshop. This was immediately ...”

“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... for making the European Human Rights Convention directly enforceable in British courts – a major constitutional change which would mean more rather than fewer applications for judicial review. And he warned liberally-minded judges, like Lord Woolf and Justices Laws and Sedley, against ‘judicial supremacism’ following articles in which they seemed ...”

“... that the wars of the 1860s and 1870s occurred. James Belich is already the author of two major studies, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Myth of Racial Conflict and I Shall Not Die: Titokouwaru’s War, New Zealand 1868-9, in which he has viewed both sides of the hill, emphasising that the Maori were formidable and very modern belligerents ...”

“... Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards the edge of the Downtown cluster of corporate towers, and makes a subversive play on them by actually being two towers, only ten feet apart. Their surface is refinedly ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft’s recent claim that ‘terrorists use America’s freedom as a weapon against us’ carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and ...”