“... unburdening herself to Burgos-Debray. The particular details of her father’s conflicts over land may, as so often in families, have been largely unknown to his children. Her recorded version was a colourful, moving and, on the whole, honest account of what it was like to be an Indian woman in Guatemala during the years of struggle and repression. Yet ...”

“... is a belief in technical feasibility, and this provides one of the volume’s staple concerns. It may not be stretching terms too far to label the interest which in each case is engaged an aesthetic one. In The New German Mentality Marcuse wrote that Nazism ‘mobilises the mythological layer of the human mind, which constituted the vast reservoir of the ...”

“... of whether one is on the right track is whether most people think the contrary. Comrade Hitchens may still be susceptible to the pull of fraternity when embodied by old buddies from the New Left Review, but his self-ascribed identity now is as a ‘contrarian’. Being ‘independent’ (of parties, institutions, conventional wisdom, codes of politeness) is ...”

“... under their own momentum. One just knows he’d be a hopeless conversationalist. Magical Urbanism may seem pedestrian by comparison with the books on Southern California, whose success led to reprisals by the powerful sectors in LA he had upset by his exposures. According to Ben Ehrenreich, he was ‘driven from the city by a campaign of Red-baiting disguised ...”

“... any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs ...”

“... or shouldn’t be in the lifetime of people mentioned in any way disparagingly. If yes, offence may be caused. If no, they’ve lost the chance to answer back. But if they’re famous, oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it ...”

“... become what Wittgenstein said philosophy was: a ladder that, once used to reach the destination, may be safely discarded. Having established a state and gathered most of the Jewish diaspora within it, Zionist ideology, in their eyes, has no further purpose and should be jettisoned, along with the unwelcome burdens it entails: further colonisation of occupied ...”

“... the law. And, having lived lives generally presumed to have been even shadier than they were, they may well be immortalised as builders of temples of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies ...”

“... say, either to themselves or to the other characters present, and what sorts of thing Shakespeare may not have quite been able to say, whether for reasons of political prudence (of which he had great store) or because it was not quite possible to say them within the mental world in which he operated. In different phases of Shakespeare’s career and in ...”

“... immigration queue. At six times fewer pages than the next entry (Anthony Thwaite), the answer may be that his is a tourist visa. As their titles suggest, geography is equally crucial to the trade war pitting Longman against Norton. Given the inevitable overlap between their contents, it may be all that allows some ...”

“... sealed by ten meetings between the two men during Bush’s first term as president. Tony Blair may see Bush just as often, but he doesn’t have the same influence over him. The military and political consequences of their collaboration, which was cemented after 9/11 and during the second intifada, have been devastating for the Palestinians. With American ...”

“... into his diary after a sermon spent mentally fornicating with a friend’s teenage daughter. In May 1667, 18 months after the no-hands episode, Pepys recorded another delicious hour spent alone in a boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against ...”

“... and so the old Philip Roth line – that American reality will outstrip anything the novelist may imagine – is borne out once more. As a result, this whole section seems not just pallid and unadventurous but insufficiently novelistic. It brings a kind of ‘news’ that is better told by others: if you want to know about American penal culture and the ...”

“... in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international wars, which may be one of the reasons Colombians have frequently fought each other, and is certainly one of the reasons for the rest of the world’s indifference towards the country. Why do Colombians fight so much among themselves? In a recent House of Lords debate one ...”

“... in September 1979; the detonation by India of several devices, one thermonuclear, at Pokhran in May 1998; and Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Richelson presents each of these cases with his usual deep immersion in detail – sometimes failing to produce much in the way of insight or analysis. During World War Two, the ...”