“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shrapnel in Israel’s backside. My father refused to register my family with UNRWA. Reluctantly, we became citizens of Jordan, which was trying its best to make us forget we were Palestinians. But the hope of dividing Palestine between Israel and Jordan, with each absorbing as citizens some of these refugees without ...”

“... government to make car production and ownership a ‘pillar’ of the Chinese economy; and by the Bush administration’s National Energy Policy of 2001, which backed the continued production and consumption of oil rather than the development of alternative sources of energy. Both policies ensured that the global demand for oil would rise just at the moment ...”

“... who could be numbered among Ronald Reagan’s most enthusiastic supporters removed the ‘Reagan-Bush ’84’ bumper-stickers from their cars fairly soon after the 1984 Election was safely in the bag. No one thought the things were supposed to adorn the family automobile in perpetuity in the way that Saint Christopher medals adorned the dashboards of ...”

“... above all, in their presidential candidates, regardless of opinions on specific issues. Obama, Bush Jr, Bill Clinton, Reagan all appeared to mean what they say. Failed candidates (Hillary Clinton, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Bush Sr) were all too obviously reversing or avoiding long-held beliefs to pander to the various voting ...”

“... of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George W. – ‘W’ in this instance standing for ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’ – Bush? Or perhaps the Queen, within yards of whom, the Evening Standard was shocked to report, other ...”

“... returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour ...”

“... the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as well as publishing George Moore, an important figure in the Revival. Joyce eventually sneaked in with a wispy ‘Song’ in August 1904, though he still included the editor of Dana, John Eglinton (W.K. Magee), in the rogues’ gallery of his ...”

“... of the entire island until Washington granted Havana (limited) independence in 1902. What the Bush administration has promised in Iraq, Wood actually delivered in Cuba. Vowing to provide his charges with ‘a firm but liberal and just government of the people, for the people and by the people, under American military supervision’, he made good on his ...”

“... Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense ...”