“... and undemanding: though Taylor seems to have been a competent ophthalmologist in his twenties, by the time he received his royal appointment he had abandoned the discipline in favour of a career in journalism, and does not appear to have been called in to treat the long series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually ...”

“... have been too thin; much of what we know about his life and crimes emerged from his interrogation by the Israeli authorities and from the vast research effort that went into preparing the case against him. It would in any case have been nearly impossible to fit the life and crimes of a relatively obscure lieutenant-colonel into the giant criminal enterprise ...”

“... By the wise contrivance of the Author of nature, virtue is upon all ordinary occasions, even with regard to this life, real wisdom, and the surest and readiest means of obtaining both safety and advantage.Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsOn 13 March President George W. Bush wrote to four Republican Senators informing them that he would not be ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing worldwide emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases, especially carbon dioxide – the same protocol Al Gore as Vice-President had negotiated on behalf of the United States in 1997 ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned ...”

“... 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 ...”