“... anger, his intellect and his extravagance of personality – Kinnock seems to lack entirely, which may be why he is leader of the Labour Party while Bevan never was, since they are, severally and still more in combination, precisely the qualities the British Labour Party most distrusts. Bevan’s anger, originally against the capitalist system and those who ...”

“... away from the eyes of the international community. The ‘autonomy’ envisaged by the Camp David agreements is unlikely to extend beyond garbage collection. Ostensibly Two Minutes over Baghdad is a True Life Adventure Story in the ‘Entebbe’ tradition, in which an author trades his skills as a publicist against ‘inside’ information supplied by ...”

“... a smuttily stammering diplomat, mistranslations (‘The Ministry of Strange Affairs’), which may start a giggle or a groan, as when we’re told yet again that Petworth, a visiting lecturer in linguistics, was ‘not a character in the world historical sense’. Jokes about women’s bodies ‘are quite outstanding, one immediately remarks it’ – when ...”

“... of others, rightly belong to me.’ It is true that ‘Nathan’ is a very potent name. To some it may suggest Guys and Dolls, with good old reliable Nathan Detroit who runs the oldest-established permanent floating crap game in New York; or it might recall Lessing’s play, Nathan the Wise, about the good Jew making peace between Muslim and Christian in the ...”

“... of US debt. The deal on offer to the Republicans was described by the conservative commentator David Brooks as ‘the deal of the century’, offering ‘trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases’: A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth ...”

“... who’d helped plan the bombing campaign – notably an ambitious lieutenant colonel called David Deptula – saw the victory as proof of the virtues of what they called ‘Effects Based Operations’. Advances in technology, they reported, meant that the US could locate strategic targets and destroy them with absolute precision. It was now ...”

“... rocce sopra il Tajmyr.’ If Vostyach seems a less convincing idea in English than in Italian it may partly be that cultural predispositions are to blame. Marani’s Vostyachs ‘had found the passage towards another world in the darkness of the forests and had never wanted to turn back’ (‘nel buio delle foreste avevano trovato il passaggio verso un ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... one can pin it down no more closely than by calling it ‘anti-establishment’. Michael Frayn may have excoriated that phrase – in his brief, brilliant introduction to the published text, Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 – as denoting ‘a spacious vacancy of thought’, but really, I don’t see how we can do any better. Any real ‘establishment’ is ...”

“... clinic was notorious for cruelly ingenious contrivances to control and ‘cure’ the insane. By May the following year, Autenrieth, having concluded that Hölderlin’s illness was incurable, and assuming that he had at most three years to live, released him into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a local carpenter. Zimmer inhabited what had been part of the old ...”

“... by the certain knowledge that if they fight both will lose? According to his mood, the Almighty may be greatly amused that his most ‘intelligent’ creation is at risk of using his brains to destroy himself; or He may react like Arkel in Pelléas et Mélisande: ‘Si j’étais Dieu, j’aurais pitié du coeur des ...”

“... ask when the clothing firm Benetton, by using a photograph on a poster of the dying Aids activist David Kirby, borrowed concern and pity for commercial ends. But the situation is complicated. In other contexts advertising techniques were taken up vigorously by Aids activists. Indeed, a poster was produced showing the same image with the message, ‘There’s ...”

“... to baptise several Salem ministers who promptly had him put in an asylum for a month); and Henry David Thoreau (and if Emerson was Arctic, what zone can we designate for the glacial Thoreau? Emerson himself said: ‘As for taking Thoreau’s arm, I should as soon take the arm of an elm tree’). There were also the various members and guests of the ...”

“... spokesman for Social Darwinism and the gospel of work, while Izabela, the aristocratic beauty who may or may not be the ‘doll’ of the title, is first seen reading a novel by Zola. Wokulski is in love with Izabela and gains considerable power over her, but, besides being a heartless flirt, she can never get over the fact ...”

“... dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in which the disguises of art could rejoice and revel, displaying themselves in their own way ...”