“... from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended earlier than we bores like to remember, and in part because some of his early ...”

“... Widely excoriated in his own time as one of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in ...”

“... When I was ten years old, I attended a youth camp organised by my local mosque. At the end of a week of lectures and quizzes we were asked to present a project on an aspect of Islam, preferably something we had learned during the week. A set of older boys produced a booklet called ‘Islam Is the Solution’. The front cover was an image of two tanks facing each other, one flying the American flag, the other the Soviet ...”

“... that, which is, in its way, rather restful. And the cricket reports are good.’ Under New Labour, by contrast, every day in Downing Street starts with a careful sifting of the press; there are strong responses to any stories which might have been ‘inspired’ or leaked. Enormous care is taken to try to manage the news not just in the obvious sense of trying ...”

“... of him in that life. It shows three young men dressed in high riding boots and what seems to be Prussian military uniform – white jodhpurs, dark, perhaps blue, gold-braided tunics, a white sash. (The Junker grandees in the von Werner painting of the proclamation of the Second Reich in 1871 were dressed rather like this.) The three look no older than ...”

“... For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the king alone, who kept England on the course he had mapped out.’ For Geoffrey Elton, by contrast, writing in the ...”

“... When Moazzam Begg was kidnapped by the American government and its Pakistani foederati on 31 January 2002 – ‘kidnapped’ appears to be the appropriate legal term to use of Guantánamo Bay prisoners, none of whom has ever been charged, tried or formally designated a POW – he experienced a curious moment of melodrama ...”

“... mull over a draft for more than a decade in wait for the right line or word, a point dwelled on by both ardent fans and detractors. Lowell’s sonnet of tribute to her asks: Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your noticeboard, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase … ? Lowell’s sonnet reminds us that even ...”

“... The majority of books about John F. Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth. The historian Robert Dallek is neither; he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading ...”

“... between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, sisters and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary ...”

“... A new novel by J.M. Coetzee is always an event, although often a disconcerting one. ‘Disconcerting’ will be too polite a word for many readers, who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005 ...”

“... acting decisively, even aggressively – is a key component of Israeli politics. Eshkol tended to be scornful about the process he’d set in motion. In his favourite language, Yiddish, he said that Israel was thought of as a ‘nebichdike Shimsen’ (‘pitiful Samson’). For years the Israeli soldier has been depicted this way, as a conscience-stricken man ...”

“... the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and looking finally at the ‘creative’ measures taken by Israeli planners, including the military, to render the occupation more ‘comfortable’, ‘human’ and ‘effective’. According to Weizman, architecture is much more than the way a building looks or the materials used in its construction: it is grand ...”

“... Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt’. Geldzahler, a ‘happily smiling little roly-poly fonctionnaire … [was] immaculately jaunty in a pale blue suit’. He wanted to see the loft. Hughes told him there was ...”

“... stayed in business ever since.Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His early life was shaped first by the war and then by the Soviet occupation. This was the period of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Siblings (published in 1963 but only recently translated into English), when an artist’s career could ...”