“... his main aim. What he had wanted was for the Arabs to take the opportunity of the war to seize power for themselves, in a great pan-Arab federation if possible. He persuaded himself that he had at least Britain’s agreement to this. When the time came to ‘settle’ the Middle East after the war, however, all that ‘turned to ashes in a single ...”

“... More important, Alderman’s antagonism to the Jewish Board of Deputies leads him to overstate its power wildly while ignoring its most valuable contribution to the community: through the Board, anti-semitic activities are monitored; the Jewish community is safer as a result of its vigilance. If one wants to understand the nature of Anglo-Jewish ...”

“... usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate malefactor, mirroring the imbalance of power in practice. Even the rare exceptions give the punchline to power. In the 1721 edition of Cambridge Jests, a condemned thief tries to charm his way to a commuted sentence: ‘my Lord, your Name is Bacon, and mine is ...”

“... inchoate hopes and dreams: ‘For some reason I have never lost faith,’ writes the narrator of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, ‘not since I was a young child, in the power of letters to transform my existence . . . there is the white envelope, that glorious rectangle of pure possibility which has even shown ...”

“... it ‘an unexpected, almost miraculous accord between abandon to the world and confidence in its power’. This phrase illuminates the role of ‘the world’ in the book’s title and the allusion to one of Satyajit Ray’s best-known films, The Home and the World. Daney is at his brilliant best when writing about Orson Welles, whose films ‘begin where ...”

“... show his sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is demanded of them than ‘implicit obedience – unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to ...”

“... push the beginnings back to the surveillance and discipline – ‘the new technologies of power’ – that the monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries developed to control their subjects. Valentin Groebner traces the origins back to the regulatory urges of even older political and religious institutions: ‘Modern identity papers can in fact be ...”

“... fighting only in self-defence. According to a patriotic broadside of 1803, the French fight for Power, for Plunder, and extended Rule – WE, for our Country, our Altars, and our Homes. – They follow an ADVENTURER, whom they fear – and obey a Power which they hate – WE serve a Monarch whom we love, a GOD whom we ...”

“... ammunition: John Ford, John Wayne, Henry Hathaway and the Colt, legendary instrument of masculine power and decisiveness. The general’s impromptu movie was a good deal more exciting than the twenty-minute one that we were actually filming. At dinner that evening, everyone, including the director’s female PA, couldn’t stop talking about their new-found ...”

“... such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in 1910, the year he ...”

“... a nervous breakdown, nor why he receives messages from well-wishers like ‘the David and Jonathan Society, a newly-formed group of young, caring, Jewish faggots’. Joshua’s mother runs a massage parlour called Oral is Beautiful in Winnipeg which offers bilingual services. This is hardly enlightening. As baffling is the police interest in certain ...”

“... not to dismiss the complaints of voters tempted by the BNP but to fix whatever is within their power to fix and to communicate those achievements clearly. In Barking and Dagenham – or more properly, the giant Becontree estate that occupies much of the borough – that meant front gardens. Becontree is largely composed of semi-detached houses built by the ...”

“... is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel’s fascinating The Radical Enlightenment,* there was, in 1680, a simple litmus test for intellectual and moral responsibility. You failed this test if you believed, as Spinoza did, that motion is intrinsic to matter, for that would imply that God ...”

“... after legend’ arrived at the table. He counts them in: Alan Sugar, Carol Vorderman, Jonathan Ross, Miriam Stoppard, Tony Parsons. Even for someone who started his career in national journalism as a showbiz reporter on the Sun, these are pitifully undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just ...”

“... that’s what he says in his memoirs, where he insists that he only worked out how to exercise power effectively towards the end of his time in office. Now he wants to help others start out with the wisdom he had to acquire through ‘bitter experience’. But political leaders always say this: that governing starts to make sense when time is running ...”