“... other proxies, such as Israel and Iraq, though with little success. Giving Israel the green light to destroy the PLO led to the Lebanon debacle in 1982. Cynically supporting Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against the mullahs in Tehran led to pointless slaughter. Each of these episodes opened a door through which US forces entered the region. In ...”

“... of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square subway ...”

“... in the Lowlands and had been a schoolteacher before rising to the rank of major in the Highland Light Infantry during the Second World War. He was also a pillar of the Kirk. A glowering – and sometimes snide – authoritarianism was second nature to Ross, who ran Scotland in the manner of a brusque, no-nonsense dominie. His ignorant charges included most ...”

“... for Lockheed products) and head of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Another member was Donald Rumsfeld. Reappointed defence secretary by Bush in 2001, Rumsfeld paid tribute to Andrew Marshall and announced that he would effect ‘transformation’ on the Pentagon. This provoked resistance: the military leadership had no objection to receiving more ...”

“... of Guantanamo Bay. Plato and Spinoza saw it as a realm of illusion, to be contrasted with the pure light of reason. Jacques Derrida deeply disliked the notion, suspecting it of dark metaphysical tendencies. For William Blake, from whom Martin Jay takes the title of his absorbing new study, experience is a domain of false consciousness and fruitless desire. For ...”

“... Gray is actually someone who is receptive to new evidence and prepared to revise his views in the light of it. Other, more consistent ideologues have come and gone, consigned to irrelevance by their obvious intransigence in the face of events. Gray remains, a bellwether for Thatcher’s children. This gives Black Mass a certain indicatory value. It was long a ...”

“... Mr Kalugin looked as if he had been dreamed up in an Ian Fleming nightmare. His idea of light conversation, since I decided to ask him about some of the books under review, was to hint that he could say a lot if he chose. ‘Your Kim Philby ... ha, ha, ha, that’s quite another story ... Yuri Modin – well, he’s a character ...’ and so on. I ...”

“... writing, for example, or a cacophony of voices from the Civil War, or a gathering of Victorian light verse, or a provocative juxtaposition of religious writings, from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to the Book of Common Prayer. Suggestive and rarely predictable, these cross-cuttings place even the most familiar texts in a new ...”

“... orientation’ which treats individuals not ‘in conformity with a general standard but rather in light of their possession of properties that have a particular relation to one’s own properties’. I have read and reread these definitions without getting much light on the second one. It is not just that I find ...”

“... when his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in which ...”

“... art, chimpanzees and, of course, the mummies’ skulls, it argued that the ancient Egyptians were light-skinned Caucasians and black Africans their slaves. Gliddon’s Appeal had praised Champollion ‘for delivering antiquities “out of the house of bondage”’ – that is, Muhammad Ali’s Egypt. Human beings in actual bondage mattered less.During the ...”

“... a clever bugger but he can’t sing.’ Coward blamed the microphone for making him sound like Donald Duck and the humidity for putting his piano out of tune. But as the tour went on he got into his stride and the reception improved. The conditions did not. He slept in bamboo huts, keeping one eye out for snakes, witnessed the rudimentary medical care ...”

“... one weighed 68 lbs, the other 82. We won the race.Although the space fiction and the traffic light similes introduce a slightly processed, jarring quality to this ecstatic moment, we have here the poet as a latter-day Yeatsian fisherman (Hughes knew Yeats’s collected poems off by heart). Again there is the ghost of a Hopkins-style argument from design ...”

“... and guards in a mock jail, took a close interest in the Iraq prison abuses when they came to light in 2004. At Stanford, guards and their clients seem to have adapted seamlessly to life in a state correctional facility, and it is no great surprise to learn that during the Saddam era, Abu Ghraib had been designed on an architectural blueprint pioneered by ...”

“... don who must have recruited them. In 1977 the Times proclaimed to a sceptical public that he was Donald Beves, the delightful tutor of King’s known to generations of undergraduates who performed on stage in the ADC, the Marlowe or the Musical Society, and whose interest in politics or indeed in ideas was negligible: clearly his bonhomie disguised an ...”