“... A new struggle is beginning in Iraq. The most important battles likely to be waged this year will be within the Shia community. They pit the US-backed Iraqi government against the supporters of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who represents the impoverished Shia masses. ‘The Shia are the majority in Iraq and the Sadrists are a majority of this majority,’ a former Shia minister told me ...”

“... main media companies and – still – the theatre. Similarly dramatic transformations are to be repeated in other parts of the city. Frank Gehry has designed an enormous complex of shops, a basketball stadium and apartments to be built over marshalling yards in Brooklyn. Many residents are against the Gehry ...”

“... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...”

“... the Theocratic Ministry School, and comprised of four talks. Talk one (fifteen minutes) was given by an elder or senior ministerial servant and drew on material from a standard reference book. Talk two (five minutes) was a Bible reading with an introduction and conclusion and was delivered by a younger brother. Talk three ...”

“... place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence in Azerbaijan, thanks mainly to BP, the country’s biggest foreign investor. In September 2023, senior BP executives travelled to Baku for the centenary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB officer who bequeathed the presidency to his son, Ilham, when ...”

“... metal teeth. Joaquín Sancho Margelí’s family, who requested the exhumation, had said he could be identified by his silver dentures. The other skeleton was probably that of Elías Mohino Berzosa, whose family also wanted his remains exhumed. They had never known for sure if the men were buried near the north-east wall of ...”

“... scores as if it were professional wrestling, I chose to NOT follow the gutless rules laid down by an industry so terrified of risk that despite the enormous pool of young talent at its disposal, may not create pictures that will be relevant and alive fifty years from now.Coppola’s attempt at a tongue-in-cheek embrace ...”

“... this month, which happens every two or three years. The next blue moon on New Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about. The moon is strong enough to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the ...”

“... resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category. It is rich in hints about the place, or non-place, of death in our lives. People used to die, now they ...”

“... first elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

“... that he hath a secret to keep.Sir Humphrey ApplebyWhat​ is the opposite of a secret? It can’t be something that everybody knows, since there’s nothing that’s known to everyone and all secrets are known to somebody. A secret is a bit of knowledge that certain people know and certain others are intended not to know. Information doesn’t want to ...”

“... men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to ...”

“... La Gran Scena’s shows were loving parodies of operatic set pieces. (Ira Siff can regularly be heard these days on Radio 3’s relays of opera from the Met, expounding the nuances of repertoire and production.) There was necessarily some teasing of the diva ego: Vera Galupe-Borszkh, milking the applause after a spectacular number, would moan ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground ...”

“... foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the ...”