“... instance, seeks its material in untimely behaviour, an old man falling in love with a young woman (May in December), as in Molière and Chaucer, a philosopher acting like a child, a well person feigning illness. But it is also comedy as a form that brings about the restoration of timeliness through the komos with which such a work usually concludes – the ...”

“... Some murders – and some murderers – seem to disrupt that order more than others. McFeely cites David Baldus’s massive 1985 study of almost 2500 cases prosecuted in Georgia in the 1970s, which showed some remarkable, if scarcely surprising, racial disparities. If the victim was white the death sentence was far more likely to be imposed than if the victim ...”

“... or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and ...”

“... was the real cause of Mandelstam’s first arrest a day or two after the face-slapping incident: David had faced Goliath with eight stony couplets in his sling. The Moscow apartment was searched by the secret police, Mandelstam was taken to their headquarters in the Lubianka Prison, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn, where, in a ...”

“... Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most ...”

“... suspicion reached a climax in any conversation, and there were many, about mixed marriages. ‘You may find a nice shiksa and fall in love with her. Not all goyim are coarse. Many of them are truly refined, and you may marry one and live happily together for years. But someday, when you least expect it, the two of you will ...”

“... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...”

“... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...”

“... by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming fact’ is that ‘everyone on this earth ...”

“... wouldn’t have been any fuss at all if it had been his mother claiming the boy not his father. 7 May. I’m coming to the end of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I’m never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose ...”

“... sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was ...”

“... to dismiss their notions as primitive, irrational or bizarre, you should reflect that the fault may lie not in them but in you. The chances are that the problems that bothered them were nothing like the ones that strike you as obvious or inevitable, and that they were offering sensible answers to their own questions rather than foolish answers to ...”

“... German invasion and thereby gather useful information, but in the event not much was achieved. As David Abulafia put it, if ‘he was something more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run ...”

“... the Communist Party (the Jewish Arab List) and MKs associated with Zionist parties, especially David Ben Gurion’s Labour. He looks at wedding songs to trace the different streams of Palestinian political behaviour. He finds informers who snitched on their neighbours and on people they saw in the village shop or on the city bus; who reported things they ...”

“... hydrangea); and his need for his unconscious to have its way involves an ambivalence about what it may bring home (the dreams about his dog – restitution, or nightmare?). Ammons was raised in a house that had hardly any books. All he could remember reading were the first 11 pages of Robinson Crusoe – the rest of the book had disappeared. That memory is ...”