“... Thomas Friedman is so much the kind of American that the rest of the world likes to despise that it’s a fair assumption he has, at least in part, adopted the pose consciously. He calls himself a ‘tourist with attitude’ and his attitude is that of the know-it-all, ‘wise up, you dumb cluck’ American journalist who is here to tell you your economy is blown, your politics stink and you haven’t a hope in hell of making it in today’s world ...”

“... of residence or identity and I’m sent home to get them.14 May. A piece in the Independent about David Blunkett tackling falling standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can’t make out. Either would please me.Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes’s memorial service in ...”

“... still exercised by the American ambassador and the American military commander, Lieutenant-General David Barno. Afghans and foreigners alike call Karzai the mayor of Kabul and Khalilzad the proconsul. Those close to both report that Karzai not only defers to Khalilzad but seeks his advice on all important issues. It was Khalilzad – American-educated and ...”

“... establish that in perpetuity, were confirmed by the point on which Barak was most adamant at Camp David in 2000: the absolute and irrevocable finality of whatever was agreed. There are frightening continuities between Israel’s unilateralism in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories. Some of them are pointed up in Jean Said Makdisi’s extraordinary war ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... that would make up his second collection, North of Boston (1914); he approached a publishing firm, David Nutt, as represented by Mrs M.L. Nutt, ‘a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea’, who bought the first book and an option to publish the next four.Through the Imagist F.S. Flint, he secured ...”

“... to the Yellow Book, he never gave up on the priesthood – hence the deliberately misleading ‘Fr Rolfe’ of his title pages. His novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904) narrates with solemn dream logic the impasse in the conclave that forces the cardinals to choose as pope George Rose, an expelled seminarian turned scribbler. As Pope Hadrian, he strives for the ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... to perform the alchemy, and to get a licence you needed help from the top. The Washington Post’s David Hoffman, in the best journalistic account of the heroic age of Russian capitalism, The Oligarchs, found an old professor, the head of a giant research institute, who remembered Khodorkovsky and another young man coming to him to ask for some start-up ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... as with Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in England, there is an evil, compelling genius – David Blakeley, murdered by her as her only escape – or, as with Myra Hindley, an evil, compelling ‘mad’ genius, Ian Brady, virtually taking over her soul by making her do the most unimaginable harm to innocent children. Women’s crimes or even ...”

“... strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in ...”

“... for it.’ This from the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved ...”

“... in Paris with Jane Bowles and Martha Gellhorn; in Grasse and California she cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained ...”