“... ones. My only regret is that this book – you can think of it as the third of a trilogy – will be more widely read than Sahlins’s Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) and Islands of History (1985). What ‘Natives’ Think is entirely focused on the question of whether the Hawaiians, on their first prolonged encounter with Europeans, not ...”

“... volumes for rereading and reference (and let us hope the indices are up to it, for there appear to be lacunae). Conveniently, Volume I appears first – an editorial achievement, for collaborative undertakings of this magnitude are always subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s ...”

“... Uprising in New York, but it did not produce a significant literature for another ten years. To be sure, essayists (Hocquenghem in France, Tripp in America, Altman in Australia) had begun in the early Seventies to write theoretical works about homosexuality; but fiction had to wait until 1978 to make a major impact. At that time emerged a new gay fiction ...”

“... This book by its own admission goes for breadth over depth in its consideration of disability in film. Like many a cultural archaeologist coming upon a rich site, Martin Norden does what Schliemann did at Troy and sinks his shafts in haste, turning up many treasures but profoundly disturbing the strata in the process ...”

“... members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA. Ignoring renewed protestations from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness that Sinn Fein is separate from the IRA, that it is a political party with a democratic mandate from its voters, most politicians ...”

“... development in the world today – globalisation – it is a shame that he spoils his case by wrapping it in the Star-Spangled Banner. His voice is born of a century or more of American exceptionalism, of the belief in America as the city on a hill to which all yearn to travel, the superpower whose fin-de-siècle worries that its imperial powers were ...”

“... me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all round, the only character not requiring updating (or a new perspective) is an old actress, Sarita Myrtle, who’s gone completely doolally, and so still seems contemporary. The most startling revelation ...”

“... make Afghanistan regress even from the state in which Byron found it seventy years ago: meddling by the US and USSR in Afghanistan’s internal affairs; the Soviet invasion; the arming of insurgents in what President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called ‘the Muslim holy war against Communism’; the politicisation of Islam; the ...”

“... I think that either Jews or Arabs are worth dying for. Woody Allen’s line about being brought up by a castrating Zionist mother comes to mind. My own was an active Communist as a medical student in Buenos Aires in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and recalls that era somewhat righteously to justify her failure to take part in any similar activity in Israel ...”

“... By​ 2014, Keir Starmer was tired of running up against the ‘limits of legal justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor ...”

“... saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely normal: ‘I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris ...”

“... policeman in wartime Sierra Leone finds himself in an almost mathematical bind. It would be a mortal sin for Henry Scobie not to go to Mass with his wife, Louise, but if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution ...”

“... straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil. Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of ...”

“... apparatus of an authoritarian state, on the other hand, has been riveting. It was always bound to be. Mikhail Khodorkovsky graduated from the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in 1986, with a degree in chemical engineering. At university he’d been deputy head of the Komsomol, in charge of making sure other students came to Party meetings and of excluding them ...”

“... and Barcelona was an exhilarating place to imagine they’d found it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right ...”