“... an external Other of Europe, for centuries it formed an integral part of the European system of powers itself. Turkey is in that sense no newcomer to Europe. Rather its entry into the Union would restore a continuity, of mixtures and contacts, from which we still have much to learn. Such, roughly speaking, is the discourse of Turkish entry into the EU that ...”

“... the ‘Men in White’ – has given way to an ever more circumscribed stratum, a process which Michael Barr, the leading historian of modern Singapore, examines in rich detail. The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by ...”

“... its local functionaries dismissing it as ‘meaningless’. But in the shepherd of the referendum, Michael Mouskos, it had met with more than it reckoned. Five months later, he was elected head of the church, at the age of 37, as Archbishop Makarios III. Son of a goatherd, he had gone from a seminary in Cyprus to university in Athens and postgraduate studies ...”

“... is the deliberate killing of human children who have a right to live. One pro-life activist, Michael Griffin, was recently found guilty of murder because he shot a Florida doctor dead outside an abortion clinic. Though he now claims he was brainwashed, he is reported to have written a letter from jail in which he encouraged other activists to do the ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”

“... humour, neither of them from the narrator’s point of view. The image of the acrobats is from Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, and isn’t, on its first mention in that book, a dream: ‘The doors are twenty feet high, as if awaiting the day when a family of acrobats will walk from room to room, sideways, without dismantling from each other’s ...”

“... your lover) and to be offering his publishers a valuable franchise along the lines of the late Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen. From the start, it would have been a frail scheme to rely on. The book’s prologue, in which a Korean labourer, falsely accused of killing a young woman, is beheaded in front of Minami by a military policeman on the day of ...”

“... rancour in the portrait. ‘As Bellow became famous,’ Kazin admits, ‘his sense of his great powers was affronted by the stupidity of others. It would be my function in life, like that of all critics, to disappoint him.’ There is a little more salt in the portrait of Lionel Trilling: In person, there was immense and even cavernous subtlety to the ...”

“... and so on. These kinds of magical happening are nowadays assumed to be evidence of great creative powers. Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. But this is more like hysterical realism than magical realism: it borrows from the real while evading it. These novels are profligate with what might be called inhuman stories: ‘inhuman’ not because ...”

“... trust in the ‘intelligence community’. If they can’t save us, who will? They need all the powers they have been given if they are to achieve what they must. On 29 May, the Times published another front-page Kushner story, this one by Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Sharon LaFraniere. The attack now began at the beginning – ‘The most successful ...”

“... African Revenue Service. A raft of experienced officers were lost and the agency’s investigative powers curtailed. KPMG, which audited the Guptas for fifteen years, wrote off Vega’s wedding costs as a business expense. PwC, the auditor of South African Airways, concluded that the company was in compliance with regulations, when it was actually being ...”

“... of the 19 are biographical studies and are often outstandingly good: the essay on Douglas Jay and Michael Stewart (‘The Tortoise and the Hare’), for example, is absolutely just and that on David Owen – which I doubt that Owen will like very much – is remarkable. On the whole, I think the theoretical essays are more successful than the historical ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... The age of true Classicism in painting was over before Victoria’s accession: Ingres, as Michael Greenhalgh has lately pointed out, was no true Classicist. The Grecising pictures of the Leightons and the Alma Tademas employ Greek decor, but are in temper, as in quality, singularly unhellenic. Another domain in which we encounter much Greek decor, but ...”

“... reluctant to leave their respective countries, and only did so to attend conferences of the great powers. But Churchill could hardly wait to get on a boat or a plane for a Cook’s Tour of the battlefields, or meetings with exotic foreign potentates. Three of his four Christmases as prime minister were spent overseas. He made so many flights around the ...”