“... Summaries of books read: The Interpretation of Dreams, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Self and Others. All incredibly tidy, with underlinings in red. And exploding flowers and nudie ladies stuck on the inside cover, as if in illustration of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which Carter would have been working on at the time. What ...”

“... all considerations of mercy and humanity must bow before the inexorable demands of self-preservation.’ Civilised warfare obtained except when it didn’t. Whether what actually happened in the Valley or in other places was, by some abstract standard, merciless, pitiless and uncivilised seems a moot point. Contemporaries certainly thought that ...”

“... society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular ...”

“... dabs of kerosene light and the occasional brace of headlights showed a city was there at all. Robert, an Armenian PE teacher who had befriended me in the coupé, took me through the frosty murk of Yerevan’s central station and into a doorway. In an instant there was light, power, a swift transaction involving tokens, a set of escalators, and at their ...”

“... model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self-destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet ...”

“... or promissory notes that would go begging in their own country. The Axial Age launches a self-reinforcing pact of coin and sword. Payment of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that ...”

“... they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers ...”

“... about great players and great goals and great matches, but it is also about football as a tool for self-projection and for influence-peddling, about the role it has played in nation-building and about the role it increasingly plays as countries negotiate their positions in a globalised world’. West Germany’s half-apologetic victory in 1954, for ...”

“... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...”

“... as a ‘special area of human hope’. For many refugees, it evidently still is; but the EU’s self-appointed role in the vanguard of the fight for universal values has become doubtful, to say the least. There are others who might secretly be hoping for Brexit. The financial industry on the Continent calculates that it might get London’s ...”

“... have found the troops in the 1930s, if there had been no calming prospect of advance towards self-government and eventually independence? Yet intelligent men like O’Dwyer and less intelligent men like Dyer never stopped believing that Britain could hold India down by force ad infinitum. And Nick Lloyd appears to think so still. Kim Wagner’s view is ...”

“... a Labour leader, when fighting to win a general election?’ ITV’s excitable political editor, Robert Peston, asked the same day. It was bracing stuff, and if you’re sympathetic (perhaps even if you aren’t; Brexit and Trump are at the back of everyone’s minds, after all), it makes you sit up and wonder, however fleetingly: could he do it?In ...”

“... my eyes to what can go on between two men of different ages and class and character: At that self same instant that M. de Charlus passed through the gateway whistling like a fat bumblebee, another one, a real one this time, entered the courtyard. Who knows whether it was not the one so long awaited by the orchid, that had come to bring her the rare ...”

“... used tactics that would become familiar in the 1960s: sit-ins, boycotts, litigation, even armed self-defence. And in 1948, President Truman, employing his constitutional power as the military’s commander-in-chief to make an end run around Congress, ordered the armed forces to embrace ‘equality of treatment and opportunity’ regardless of race, religion ...”

“... history, and its politics are not what you might expect. Last time I was in Colombia I carried Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics: a great help in listing questions about this old and battered democracy, if democracy is what the answers to his questions prove it to be.* ‘Old’? Competitive elections have been held in Colombia, on and off, at ...”