“... many members of the ‘counter-culture’ subscribing, for example, to the gay shibboleth that we’re all perpetually dressed in drag. (That is, we use clothes and manner to fabricate a conventional gender identity that’s inconsistent with the shifting, unconventional nature of our individual desires.) What did matter ...”

“... of the Herero people in the early years of the last century. Part of the horror of Rwanda is that we think of genocide as belonging to an age we had left behind. Gaillard, a medieval scholar, said that the apocalypse in Rwanda was prefigured in the works of Breughel and in the cast of characters consigned to the Inferno in ...”

“... prejudiced in favour of individual over collective judgments. This is hardly surprising, since we are all biased. First, we are biased in favour of our own opinions, which we tend to prefer to those of anyone else. Second, we are biased in favour of ...”

“... of Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez) and then under Manuel Noriega (former friend of George Bush), is now firmly back in its control. (As John Major says in the Cambridge History, the Panama Canal has been the ‘outstanding symbol of Washington’s power to dominate the weaker states of the hemisphere’.) It still exercises direct colonial ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”

“... cabinet, and he continued in the government as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power. Churchill commented sourly: ‘He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a ...”

“... defeat denouncing their pusillanimous leader and unreconciled to their new role as voters. How can we understand these women’s passionate attachment to their own political exclusion? True, some of the overstretched working women of today, rushing to make it to the polls before doing the shopping and picking up the kids, might feel a sneaking admiration for ...”

“... tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 the administration trotted out the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, the consummate oilman, as special presidential envoy to restructure Iraq’s $130 billion debt. Baker’s law firm represents Halliburton; Baker Hughes, his oil-services company, was promised the contract to restore ...”

“... view of the matter is damned as ‘elitist’. As these attitudes assert and impose themselves, we are encouraged to talk not merely of an aspirational class but of an ‘aspirational society’ at once insistently egalitarian and aggressively competitive. Politicians of all parties are committed to giving the aspirational society more of what it is thought ...”

“... schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, declared at the festivities. His father, Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s second founding father – would ...”

“... own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of ...”

“... they did the same thing with a second corpse, this time fitted with a heavy rubber-soled boot. ‘We found that boots did to some exent protect the ankle, but that the fracture that it might have suffered now occurred higher up the leg,’ he wrote in his first volume of autobiography, From Apes to Warlords (1978). The Second World War was the first fullscale ...”

“... already know a story, it is by no means always easy to identify representations of it. A burning bush in a stained-glass window, or a man sticking out of a whale’s mouth, or a baby in a stable, will be recognised for what they are, no doubt: but even learned church visitors commonly need a guidebook to identify the majority of the scenes. And there is no ...”

“... itself a creation of the US and heavily beholden to it: its members were handpicked by President Bush’s special envoy, Paul Bremer, and they remain entirely dependent on the occupying authority for resources, security and what little power they hold. For the most part, the Council’s members suffered horribly under Saddam’s regime, or were forced into ...”

“... outburst translates the smouldering spark of grievance into political action. The massive changes we are now witnessing are reflected in the coincidence of a more realistic Soviet policy under Mikhail Gorbachev and a remarkable political convulsion in China. The common causal element in these phenomena is the conclusion by the people in the major Communist ...”