“... of Mesopotamia. I imagined that when the army reached the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, there would be another photo op, and we would be told that the complex had been secured. By 8 April, the US army was reported to have reached the Ministry of Information, two streets away from the ...”

“... had appeared some while before, but the summer school students were in any case more intrigued by the doings of Silvio Berlusconi and the daily stories of political chicanery in La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. They also had revealing stories of their own. In Bulgaria, we were told, one vote in seven had been bought ...”

“... gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas demos on which the police look kindly, the Countryside ...”

“... no sooner was I out & contemplating the burning wreck in a Gibbonian manner than I was screamed at by a loudspeaker: told not to be mad … & to run fast. It was only then that I observed that the other passengers were as specks in the distance & that I was alone in my distinguished detachment. Noticing, in his self-amused ...”

“... world beyond? I’ll never know because I always missed the moment. Khrushchev’s Thaw was over by the time I got to the Soviet Union, leaving only the post-euphoria hangover. I could have been in Paris in the summer of 1968 but stayed in Oxford instead, writing my thesis. Then I went to America, but it was already the early 1970s, and people were turning ...”

“... Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in Britain, his crash course in suicide terrorism, mercifully inadequate, had been provided by AQAP somewhere in Yemen. Yemen is a proper country, unlike the imperial ...”

“... known.Songs matter more than you might think; so do some places, especially California, and so, by the end, do the mixed blessings of fame. The most important place, though, is the first: Mossbawn, County Derry, the farmland where Heaney – the son of a cattle dealer and a housewife, with eight younger siblings – spent his childhood. O’Driscoll and ...”

“... What is Pakistani writing? Whatever it might be, it seems to have taken up newsprint lately. Things have been changing quickly and irrevocably over the last seven or eight years: a great symbol of American capitalism was destroyed by two aeroplanes; this was followed, some years later, by a crash in the market no less resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case ...”

“... is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience. One question she probably will not be asked, however, is what she meant ...”

“... for two dollars while two old Jewish musicians played a kind of wised-up klezmer, but I seemed to be the only person in town with two dollars to spare. I was standing at the back of a crowded tram. People in this part of the world have a superstitious belief that if you open a window, you’ll get sick and die, and it was therefore a very stuffy and smelly ...”

“... An Autobiography​ ’ by R.G. Collingwood must be one of the most popular philosophical books in the English language, but when it was published in 1939, it was not expected to do well. Collingwood warned Oxford University Press that it was ‘destitute of all that makes autobiography saleable ...”

“... all the time. Anything we do online, and any phone call we make, is potentially being analysed by the NSA and its friends. But, as Luke Harding discloses in his book on the Snowden affair, the most viewed story in the Guardian’s history wasn’t any of this: it wasn’t a piece of news at all. It was the 12-minute video, made ...”

“... up as leader of the Labour Party, let alone prime minister. Social democrats were being mowed down by a resurgent neoliberal right throughout the Western world in the 1980s, but aside from that probably insurmountable obstacle, Williams is right to say that she lacked the necessary drive and ruthlessness. The real question is not why Shirley Williams didn’t ...”

“... An earlier and very popular hashtag, #welovetheNHS, had been started in response to the claim by opponents of Obama’s ‘public option’ in US healthcare that the NHS was a widely hated basket case. Then, each contributor had supplied an anecdote, crammed into 140 characters, about something the NHS had done for them or for their relatives. The tag ...”

“... towards them until I collided with something wide and hard: a vast object which turned out to be a London bus, slewed across the street and abandoned by passengers and driver. The orange pips were the bulbs of its lower-deck lights. It was quiet but not soundless. It was like the H.G. Wells story in which time is slowed ...”