“... understand that they have much to gain from working with liberals, and that democratic governance may provide the ummah, and the faith itself, with better protection than a rigid Islamic state such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. Bayat describes the loose coalition of liberal and Islamist democrats as ‘post-Islamist’, in that they seek to establish ‘a pious ...”

“... Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the imagination struggles. The best it can do is a jam jar with a newt inside: the boy is ...”

“... and naturally they pretended they hadn’t heard me. Further up Ballygunge Circular Road is the David Hare Training College, named after a 19th-century Scottish watchmaker and fiercely non-evangelical educationist beloved by Bengalis of the time. The place was swarming with convivial-looking policemen. I sat down opposite a man in khaki regalia, with ...”

“... mistakenness or even duplicity? At any rate, when the outside doesn’t match the inside, things may be going, or have gone, awry. That boundary is not so simple.It’s possible I am overthinking this imaginary moment of early scripture. But it fascinates me that introducing a dialectic of inside and outside polarises the attributes of each and ...”

“... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly ...”

“... narrator, whose attitudes and motives become increasingly sinister towards the end of the book, may be as unreliable a guide to what happens in these stories as he usually is in Hogg’s fiction. He has a hard time making the stories fit the title: each story is a compendium of all three perils, and in the second, two-part story his sententious insistence ...”

“... of whether one is on the right track is whether most people think the contrary. Comrade Hitchens may still be susceptible to the pull of fraternity when embodied by old buddies from the New Left Review, but his self-ascribed identity now is as a ‘contrarian’. Being ‘independent’ (of parties, institutions, conventional wisdom, codes of politeness) is ...”

“... sealed by ten meetings between the two men during Bush’s first term as president. Tony Blair may see Bush just as often, but he doesn’t have the same influence over him. The military and political consequences of their collaboration, which was cemented after 9/11 and during the second intifada, have been devastating for the Palestinians. With American ...”

“... of experience’ or ‘The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.’ The Romantics may have invented this all-powerful sense of the aesthetic, but they invented the distrust of it as well. Keats could sound as rapt as anyone about the autonomy and power of the poetic mind (‘The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place ...”

“... James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of design and of children’s books and illustration, but the others, the painters and sculptors, had until recently all but disappeared from the canon of 20th-century British art. More traditionalist work from the period has, by ...”

“... the poor ‘are the unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank’. We may act to ease misery from time to time, but many apparently soft-hearted attempts to uplift the wretched of the earth wind up increasing overall suffering. Poor relief only encourages its recipients to breed more of their like, so reducing each individual’s ...”

“... the mental space of diaries at large. But let it be admitted first that whatever else a journal may or may not be good for, it is a good subject for the attentions of an editor. By definition attuned to the private and familiar (and to perceiving them as familiar), the journal necessarily calls for the services of an ...”

“... flogged.’ Never mind that the modern house is a rarity even in the United States – ‘there may be two in town’ – or that the truly modern interior only turns up with any frequency in ‘watch the rich’ magazines. It is the ‘backyard barbecue’ and not the back-breaking Wassily chair which is ubiquitous. But the well-rehearsed sense of threat ...”

“... is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations that impose on universities and student unions a new duty to ‘secure freedom of speech within the law’ for academics, students, staff and ...”

“... true poetry?’Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to ...”