“... division and internal conflict. The action of previous US envoys – such as General Zinni and George Tenet – served only to increase these divisions. The lesson has not been learned. President Abbas’s dismissal of the government on 14 June and his declaration of an emergency government – both decrees of questionable legality – brought an end to ...”

“... to catch the minister’s eye when the new curriculum is being drafted. Students will be expected, we can easily imagine, to learn all about the ‘core British values’ Wilkes bequeathed to Britain (and the US), but probably not to ask whether his legacy remains intact, and what care the government is taking to ensure its preservation. Law-making by the ...”

“... catering and training.In the space of a month last summer – nearly twenty years after George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom – all these bases, large and small, fell to the Taliban as the last US troops prepared to withdraw from the country. In almost every case, the Taliban fighters didn’t have ...”

“... So abrasively​ right-wing was George W. Bush’s gravel-voiced vice-president, Dick Cheney, that he got the nickname Darth Vader. Out of office he hammed up the part, making public entrances to the Imperial March from Star Wars. He once asked his wife, Lynne, if it annoyed her that people referred to him as Darth Vader ...”

“... My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory. We were friends, though not intimate ones, and while both of us were politically committed historians, and both preferred wearing informal gear as historians rather than regimental uniform, we marched to different drummers ...”

“... tells Rambo, are holding hostage American prisoners of war. Rambo, who wants to know if ‘we get to win this time,’ thinks his mission is to free the prisoners. But the ‘stinking bureaucrat’ in charge of the covert operation has another agenda. The 1972 peace treaty between the United States and Vietnam, he explains, promised war reparations to ...”

“... 1992. They all hoped for the election of Clinton, because it got rid of the hated ‘moderate’ George Bush and also gave them the ideal Democrat against whom to ‘define’ themselves.) After his triumph last November, I got hold of Gingrich’s doctoral thesis from Tulane University. It was about education policy in the Belgian Congo. Not very well ...”

“... to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors. While I do not want to overdo this, some more information about your school education, for example, or your family background, may be useful.’ Coetzee, who was 33 and a ...”

“... me a right’ – at which Moore is heard to murmur: ‘Oh I agree, I totally agree with that.’ We share Heston’s discombobulation when Moore subtly shifts the tone of the conversation, asking why America has more gun murders than many other countries. ‘We have more mixed ethnicity than some other countries,’ Heston ...”

“... the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the ...”

“... the 1989 protests. Link had been supposed to accompany Fang to a dinner hosted in Beijing by George Bush, then Vice-President; instead the police arrested Fang. Link and Nathan have stitched together a remarkably readable account of the Tiananmen protests, taking us from the campuses of Beijing to the inner sanctums of power and including passages ...”

“... singing Japanese folk songs in a statesman’s suit and a pair of rice farmer’s clogs. We viewers were delighted. After his death, his daughter, an obscure housewife, stumped her father’s old stronghold in jeans and T-shirt and scored 90 per cent of the vote. She has dressed more stylishly for Parliamentary appearances, and is no less ...”

“... Kiarostami made the best one. On the screen, against the dark background of the frying pan, we see the butter melting and bubbling and the eggs being dropped in one at a time, one of the yolks breaking and spreading – fried eggs, sunny-side up, taking shape in close-up before our eyes. Isolated and enlarged, the two eggs cooking over an unseen fire ...”

“... of dirt: a dog crappant on a lawn vert. A supermarket-till cartouche Looping inanely through a bush must have been threaded by some child. No civic wall but is defiled by spraygunned mottoes, jousting cocks – the clichés of the heterodox. The extensions of the conceit are worked out here as thoroughly as in any of the old Elizabethans, and in a fashion ...”

“... threatened to bury me. That was in 1956, when he buried the Hungarian Revolution. In California we welcomed Hungarian victims of Soviet brutality while finding no room for the Guatemalans whose democracy the CIA had crushed two years earlier. We were trained to ignore our victims and to fear our enemy. After ...”