“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... is that he eludes the art historians. With Vermeer expert knowledge doesn’t take you far. There may be symbolic significance in a discarded broom, say, or an unemptied laundry basket, but that is not the point of the painting. The paintings are about women and about loving women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ...”

“... the middle two-thirds of the 20th century and a second rise over the past generation. The story may be most surprising to economists. Piketty tells it explicitly to correct the optimistic theory Simon Kuznets proposed in 1955, which was widely accepted in the profession, that inequality lessens as economies mature. If Piketty is correct, the extremes of ...”

“... writes white: ‘After which Bob and I      .’ The type for these provoking blanks may be a boyhood diary he recalled keeping; a strange incident had occurred when he was sent for a walk on the Downs near Eastbourne by his prep-school headmaster, and had been induced to masturbate a middle-aged man behind some gorse bushes (‘Dear little ...”

“... my teenage son – and I too have tweeted an image that links me to Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture taken along with her great friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second ...”

“... a drawing of myself (‘Cheers!’). The temporarily denominated pub is called the Crossed Pipes.4 May. A review by Elaine Showalter of a biography of the photographer Richard Avedon in which I am mentioned as one of his sitters. Sitting it was too, and in acute discomfort, as Avedon chose to pose me perched on the branch of a tree in Hyde Park, one leg on ...”

“... workers, impoverished miners, people who are less concerned with the idea that their nation-state may have become a job-lot than they are with physical safety, food and livelihood, all of which Executive Outcomes has reinstated for tens of thousands of non-combatants in Africa. Yet no one would disagree that it is first and last a mercenary force, however ...”

“... billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner … for the benefit of the Iraqi ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... a groan when we get to the postmortem phase with a paragraph that begins: ‘The classicist David Grene, Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought (an interdisciplinary PhD programme at the University of Chicago, also a sort of high-powered academic salon des refusés), drew an intriguing parallel between Greek comedy and The Last ...”

“... a declaration of war on Germany’. Nolte goes on to suggest that this ‘official declaration may give grounds in support of the momentous thesis that it allowed Hitler to treat the Jews as prisoners of war and, that is, intern them.’ (This reasoning, the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer has claimed, is based on an argument advanced by ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a lively, sociable couple. The fourth member of the party on that bucolic outing was George Tioli, an ‘Italian boy . . . quite a civilised and interesting ...”

“... last poem in the book: ‘I understand “Annunciations” only in the sense that cats and dogs may be said to understand human conversations (i.e. they grasp something by the tone of the speaking voice), but without help I cannot construe it.’ Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry, when I read it as a teenager, left me even more baffled since I had ...”