“... military intervention cynically derided as Libya’s clients doing their duty to their patron, a self-serving judgment that was unfair to South Africa in particular. That the Arab League, whose support for a no-fly zone was invoked by London, Paris and Washington to claim Arab legitimation of Nato’s intervention, had a membership almost entirely confined ...”

“... as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US ...”

“... with good grace but it’s hard when it was brought about by a campaign eloquently described by Robert Harris as ‘the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime’: words which, incidentally, were written before the announcement of the murder of Jo Cox, the defacement of London’s Polish Social and Cultural Association, and the ...”

“... to the parallel cult of ‘pristine’ wilderness. Devotees of both practise a highly selective, self-induced blindness, cancelling from their view, and all claims to their sympathy, everything that intrudes on their preconceived pictures of how landscape ought to be. This sort of mental bulldozing tends to bring real bulldozing in its wake, in fits of ...”

“... the Observer hired him to report on politics in Western Europe (driving a Bentley with his friend Robert Blake) and then in Czechoslovakia (a Lagonda with the young Alan Clark). In Tuscany, on the first of these jaunts, he met Bernard Berenson, art collector and maestro of highly paid authentication. Berenson became an intimate friend, and their ...”

“... form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and ...”

“... stirred up a public outcry against continued government secrecy. The then director of the CIA, Robert Gates, promptly ordered the release of a large number of files to the National Archives. Later, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act requiring the CIA and FBI to release virtually all records even tangentially related to the ...”

“... they are only slightly more so than my aunties’ insistence that we are descended from Sir Robert Peel, or my own thought, once voiced at Gilpin Place and briskly squashed by Dad, that Uncle Clarence, my mother’s brother killed in the First War, might be the Unknown Soldier.I still have much of Aunt Eveline’s music, albums covered in brown ...”

“... issue was one of mistaken identity, of the gap which opened up as he dug the trench, between his self, that of a free man, a man with rights, and its distorted reflection in the demeanour of the island officials. For them he was merely another black man in a trench. Symbolically, he refused to be tied to the young slave, Cézar, but he remained tied to him ...”

“... naive to have misgivings about using Keats for anecdotes in which he himself figured as the nobly self-sacrificing friend and witness. These sentimentalities he communicated to Shelley, who, less naive, used them to concoct in the elegy ‘Adonais’ a version of Keats as a ‘young flower … blighted in the bud’, a hapless youth attended in his need by ...”

“... Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to lead a church without a congregation. His parting gesture was to preside over a black mass. He ...”

“... were in their dying phases and both Armenians and Azerbaijanis discovered the idea of national self-determination’. Since then, dubious historical narratives and the jargon of 19th-century nationalism have been deployed to reinforce a mutual antipathy.Nagorno-Karabakh​ – Nagorny, Russian for ‘mountainous’; Kara-Bakh, Turkish for ‘black ...”

“... a manner shaped for other purposes by the Augustan satirists, urbanely interventionist rather than self-effacing, and designed to indicate authorial management rather than to induce an illusion of unprocessed reality. This is even true of Shamela, which is written in Richardson’s letter-form and thus ostensibly cuts out the author. It is an example of a ...”

“... yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times, just as others come to seem irrelevant or antiquated and largely disappear from public debate. In the middle of the 18th century, to describe a measure as ‘displaying the respect that is due to rank’ was a commonplace ...”

“... their behaviour over the Polish border), their obsession with themselves, a strong inclination to self-pity, and a longing to be liked.’ Other qualities discussed included German ‘angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality’. Powell later said he regretted writing this down, not because it didn’t ...”