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“... outside the station what seems like a political rally in progress, with trade-union banners and a steel band just leading off towards the crematorium. The crowd entirely fills the Finchley Road and as we trudge along in the hot sunshine the march, ragged, unceremonious and heartfelt, is almost Indian in its disorganisation and spontaneity, with people coming ...”

“... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...”

“... a major field for contemporary epic and romance. In his really excellent book, After the Raj, David Rubin makes clear, perhaps inadvertently, the difficulties for a novelist of seizing what he can use and handle from that enormous area, and possessing it as his own ‘world’. It is here that the Celtic magic, if it can be conjured up, has its great ...”

“... 11.45 a.m. two military helicopters landed outside the army barracks in Târgoviste, a bleak steel town 120 kilometres north of Bucharest built in the brutal style favoured by etc, etc.’ Yet he also provides a continuous, highly readable flow of detail. Some of it is unfamiliar to the general public, if not to the experts who have tunnelled through the ...”

“... this from first-hand testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... of them. The English Protestant distrust of the papist lurks below the surface. Sinister nuns with steel-rimmed glasses create unease. On a visit to an abbey in Excellent Women, Mildred notes ‘a crowd of little black priests’ from a nearby Roman-Catholic seminary. ‘Like a lot of beetles’, her friend Dora whispers.Spinsters, clerics – and gay men, a ...”

“... a union. I watched the postwoman sorting mail in her kitchen, dividing it up into piles on the steel counter on either side of the sink, carefully dried after the evening’s washing-up. It seemed to be mainly Ikea catalogues, the cover showing an exquisitely lit arrangement of blond, cheerful furniture. The Ikea ideal did not include any obvious area for ...”

“... Most policemen would see this as something a good defence solicitor determined to show his steel might do: it would have seemed unusual in a lawyer appointed to liaise with them. In matters such as these, Khan’s appointment showed up the extreme inflexibility of the police, most of whom take a very simplistic view of members of the legal ...”

“... Paracelsus: Ills from without extrinsic Balms may heal, Oft cur’d and wounded by the self-same Steel – But us what remedy can heal or cure, Whose very nature is our worst disease. This epigram is not improved by its failure to rhyme in the third and fourth lines. (‘You might have rhymed,’ as Horatio says to Hamlet. Coleridge, a natural rhymer, is ...”

“... the sages of the East. In Sri Lanka, the most influential of these spiritual tourists was Henry Steel Olcott, a former Union Army colonel and theosophist from New Jersey whose profile appears on Sri Lankan stamps and who is claimed as one of the ‘heroes of independence’. After the American Civil War, Olcott grew disgusted by what he saw as the ...”

“... from a photograph of an embalmed armadillo foetus. The direction of travel, accessed by the steel ladders of the Elizabeth Line tracks, led directly to the Marketing Suite and Discover Centre, a tidy bungalow nicely embedded in a private allotment of wild flowers. I was eager to inspect the table model of the Radiant City, but it was not possible. Mr ...”

“... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...”

“... at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing ...”

“... but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity ...”