“... out dusty old X-rays of their children, taken before the local clinic was forced to close its X-ray services. In 2003, after the invasion, I returned to Baquba, the nondescript provincial capital, but before long the city became an early centre of armed resistance to the occupation and too dangerous to visit. When I flew into Arbil last month I hoped to ...”

“... who would be permitted to run. According to the constitution only a rajol-e siyasi, a political man, is eligible to be president. This is an ambiguous term that the Islamic Republic has never clearly defined, but state radio set out some generic conditions: he should be capable of sound political analysis, he should have public stature and a strong ...”

“... touched. ‘Why?’ I asked the Sergeant. ‘Why didn’t he eat anything?’ ‘How do I know, man?’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s not hungry. You know, a lot of detainees don’t get hungry.’ I looked at him in terror at that thought. ‘Is he all light?’ I asked. ‘Is Dave OK?’ ‘Look, man’, he said. ‘I ...”

“... barefoot and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but he was not going to be treated like this by God or man. Reading William Taubman’s tremendous biography, I see that this sort of thing kept happening to Khrushchev. Take the grand picnic for the Writers’ Union in May 1957, one of his many catastrophic meetings with the Moscow intellectuals, at which, after a ...”

“... they found themselves sharing a ship with Bobby Baker. Mr Baker, who was Lyndon Johnson’s bag-man and fixer within the Democratic Party and throughout the capital city, had been convicted in a sensational trial of tax fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, the no less legendary Edward Bennett Williams (known as ‘the ...”

“... they were Cambridge undergraduates, some thirty years ago. He was called Cristian Huneeus, a young man of landed family, a gentlemanly left-winger and already a published novelist. In those days, British readers were not so interested in South American fiction as they have since become, and few indeed were those who took an interest in South American politics ...”

“... Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which there were more than a million by the end of the decade. A lifetime’s supply cost $150, and the first issue would be ...”

“... relationships with a cautious benevolence, as if not despairing of the ultimate perfectibility of man. At the same time he was drafting an Olympian message to the vanquished (‘my twenty million subjects!’), a splendid document which Hamilton rightly quotes at length. ‘I want to give you hope’ was its theme: There is every prospect of a good harvest ...”

“... On 19 July​ 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus police, pulled over Samuel DuBose, whose car was missing its front licence plate. Tensing was wearing a body camera, and when the Hamilton County district attorney released the video ten days later, on 29 July, Americans watching the news that night saw about two minutes of what happened ...”

“... Jack Daniels on the contract rider. And then there is the bass-player. The bassist is the other man in the band. This is the guy who is only the other half of the rhythm section: the one who only backs up the drummer: who keeps the beat without setting it: whose job is to go badoompa-doompa-doompa-doom through all the worst and best solo excesses of the ...”

“... in Europe and beyond to send back to their families and friends. A picture of an unfazed young man in a hospital bed reading Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order was suddenly all over the internet. It reminded me of the photograph of three Englishmen choosing books in what remained of Holland House library after the Blitz. The young ...”

“... singing ‘Amazing Grace’.In speech after speech, Coleman, who died at 85, was remembered as a man who embodied a set of values – freedom, independence, improvisation, cultural survival – that transcend music, values shared by Coleman’s friend John Coltrane, who, just before he died in 1967, requested in his will that Coleman perform at his ...”

“... on as a species of neo-realism, and he has been faulted for not being Vittorio de Sica or Satyajit Ray, when in fact he’s more like Godard or Jean-Marie Straub. It was French enthusiasm for Kiarostami that ushered in the international vogue for Iranian cinema. As we read in the introduction to Dabashi’s book, ‘Kiarostami is like a locomotive that has ...”

“... feet.) But it could be, nonetheless, that this is the beginning of the Last Judgment, and that the man and his attentive wife nearby, being looked after by another angel, are barely out of the grave. The man too seems to be explaining things, or maybe registering and reiterating a point the angel has just made. I do not ...”

“... years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.’ The station cut away to a weather report, and then to a swing band in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, playing, with numbing tediousness, a tango, ‘La Cumparsita’, sodden at half-tempo, followed by a ...”