“... that the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Irgun Zvi Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin; the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident, and Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, by Jewish extremists long preceded that of Anwar Sadat by their Muslim ...”

“... the Beatles, they are post-Marxist in the sense that the Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably ...”

“... only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished ...”

“... Hebrew prayers on stage with a kippah on his head, wore a blazer decorated with the Star of David and, after school, went to classes on the Koran. After his mother died of cancer Begg spent some time being looked after by his father’s non-Muslim girlfriend, Josephine, who introduced him to Christmas stockings, Christmas pudding with silver ...”

“... writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career . . . Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: The bone loss and destruction in ...”

“... prostitutes and taking endless shots of dusty people unable to get up off the pavement. I may be alone in disliking this series. At any rate, Cartier-Bresson’s various visits to Mexico were considered fruitful enough to merit a discrete volume (Mexican Notebooks, 1995). But compared to the work of Mexican photographers – Manuel and Lola Álvarez ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and ...”

“... from Paris, about 150 km upstream, and the river had been swollen for a while. People in Paris may have been nervous, but by and large they put their trust in news from the national Hydrometric Service. Agents working for the service usually sent reports from their stations by cable, but on 20 January water breaking over the banks of the Loing had brought ...”

“... off with a set of ‘queries’ that might form suitable topics for polite conversation. ‘May not the harmony and discord of Colours arise from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves,’ he asked winningly, ‘as the harmony and discord of sounds arise from the proportions of the vibrations of the ...”

“... Journalism) to more than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed ...”

“... Woodrow Wyatt later gloated that he had fixed this as go-between from Murdoch to Thatcher, and he may have been right. As soon as he had the papers, Murdoch began rearranging their editors, with Evans shunted from Sunday to daily, a mistake in itself, and telling them what to do, and what to write. At the time Evans pretended that Murdoch didn’t dictate ...”

“... out on – is the principal theme of the next two instalments, Falling towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990). Written as his TV fame reached its peak, these books – scrappier than the first, and more ingratiatingly flip – get less enjoyable as qualities he’s prouder of start falling into place. Part of the problem with instalments two ...”

“... George VI​ was crowned on 12 May 1937, a hundred years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court ...”

“... hostility towards Europe, which only reinforced the wider electorate’s allergy to what Theresa May described, when she was party chairman, as the – perceived – ‘nasty party’. But did any leader or electoral strategist really have much room for manoeuvre? Bale is acutely sensitive to the ways in which previous choices and established institutional ...”

“... content. Insofar as form and language detain him, they detain him as questions of ideology. It may be for this reason that he seems to prefer drama to poetry and fiction, and that he praises ‘the particularly rapid progress of English drama’ in this period. (Drama, being more openly political than either fiction or poetry, is more progressive.) Just as ...”