“... a goal; and remind us of the desolate, empty nature of revenge if and when it is achieved. What do we have when we have it? They may also be telling us, although this is probably too metaphysical a thought to draw from such an untalky movie, something about the desolation of all achievements chased too long and too hard, the ...”

“... the rules abruptly changed in Italy. He did not have to be in Venice to enrich favourites at will (George Bush could not even keep two of his own sons from bankruptcy) or to have beautiful women in pairs overlook and presumably service his spectacular ugliness (Major, an Adonis by comparison, can only dream of such rewards). But it was only in Venice that ...”

“... he heard in his head. His last major works, the Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale ...”

“... oil supplies of the world were in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign control.’ But if ‘we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war ...”

“... over from mechanical systems for data storage and typesetting, the same was said of computers. George Landow’s Hypertext is about one way of using computers to manipulate texts. He makes high claims for hypertext, a richly interconnected kind of database. ‘Critical theory,’ Landow writes, ‘promises to theorise hypertext and hypertext promises to ...”

“... was the inevitability of a clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism. Since Balfour and Lloyd George had had intimate experience of the clash of nationalisms and religions in Ireland, that was a pretty remarkable fit of absent-mindedness, particularly as they were warned by Curzon of the likely consequences of imposing heavy Jewish immigration on a ...”

“... told themselves they would return in five or ten years – could they begin to exist. Harris, in George Lamming’s novel The Emigrants (1954), pinpoints this feeling when, setting eyes on England for the first time from a ship’s porthole, he thinks to himself: ‘There was life, life, life, and wherever there was life there had to be something other than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”