“... year – of all major US assistance programmes. Invading Afghanistan is easier than running it, as Alexander of Macedon’s heirs, the East India Company and the Red Army discovered. As Vladimir Kuzichkin wrote in Inside the KGB in 1990, the USSR had hoped for ‘the rapid liquidation of the "primitive” partisan resistance, followed by withdrawal from ...”

“... 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... President or Prime Minister or Secretary of State saw himself as another Bismark or Napoleon or Alexander. Naturally, the result was disaster, and of course the disaster could have been averted and turned into a triumph if the hapless statesman had been a better historian, or, more to the point, if he had been either Neustadt or May. The megalomania of this ...”

“... the station.’ And there is one thing more: ‘We will employ experts to reinstate the name of Mr Alexander Fallon on the plaque, previously identified as unnamed victim.’ Fires, rail crashes, bombs and blitzes: the mainline stations, unconsciously, have become our museums of melancholy. With the passage of time, monuments lose their original function, of ...”

“... holding, and never will hold.’ It’s the specific image of the pregnant widow, quoted from Alexander Herzen, that seems so clumsy: ‘The departing world leaves behind it, not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.’ The image is ...”

“... initiative to outside talent. ‘The business didn’t know what it was anymore,’ according to Michael Ovitz, the former chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, who became an industry powerhouse in this structural vacuum. ‘The studios were just banks.’‘What we’ve lost is a habit, and having lost the habit, the habit is never really going to ...”

“... The Administration has refurbished the strategic ‘understanding’ it made with Israel during Alexander Haig’s time as Secretary of State, as if the invasion had never happened, the theory being that, given unlimited aid, Israel will be assured of its security and prove a little more flexible. This has not happened. And, of course, Israel now sits on ...”

“... lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early front-runner, Foot. Of all the ...”

“... qualified they are to identify suspects in need of psychiatric help. The Crown Court study by Michael Zander and Paul Henderson was of value precisely because it gave us the opinions of all the principal participants in all the cases which went through the Crown Court within the period of the study; if, as some people have argued, the right inference to ...”

“... of racism until the news reports of the Fifties and Sixties confronted them with it. Professor Alexander Bickel of the Yale Law School wrote that television coverage of mob resistance to school desegregation brought concretely home to viewers what the abstract idea of racial segregation meant, ‘Here were grown men and women,’ he said, ‘furiously ...”

“... produced’. In an essay called ‘Mythical Work’, one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The ...”

“... and Palestinian groups. His neoconservative comrade at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Ledeen, was more explicit in conversation with Turner: ‘Iraq is not what it’s all about. We have been at war for twenty years with a terror network supported by Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia . . . Now, like it or not, we’re in a regional ...”

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading ...”

“... of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.’ Affinities ...”