“... cross in workshops, but we were in a literature class together, where the visiting professor, Richard Ellmann, had us read our own writing. I had a profound fear of public speaking, but when it was my turn, looking out over the classroom, I saw David and Heather’s faces smiling in encouragement. David in particular seemed like my own personal ...”

“... Paul Newton uses this story to mock the cliché that the British armed forces ‘punch above their weight’. ‘This was like telling a lightweight boxer he can only hit his oncoming heavyweight opponent by punching sideways … The army embraced the manoeuvre myth for it gave a veneer of plausibility to an otherwise militarily meaningless ...”

“... outlook in 25 years. He has already seen off Schröder’s attempt to install a wan version of Richard Branson as Minister of the Economy, and shaken the composure of the Bundesbank. The direction of the Government, of course, will not be set by the SPD leadership alone. The rules of any German coalition give significant leverage to the lesser partner. The ...”

“... of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead ...”

“... the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. The Lawrences decided that Sir William was an unsuitable chairman, given his record in immigration proceedings. (The Observer also objected to Edmund Lawson, Counsel to the Inquiry, on the grounds ...”

“... he wrote. ‘Even all of Palestine is not our final goal.’ Ben-Gurion would eventually throw his weight behind the Jewish revolt against British rule that began to surge in the late 1930s, in part because he was afraid of being upstaged by the right-wing militias of the underground – Menachem Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi. But he postponed ...”

“... it down. There had been a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University since Richard Hoggart set it up in 1964, but cultural studies proper only really started after Hall took over as director a few years later: ‘What is the discipline? We didn’t have one. In a way we had to construct it. Not because we had huge ambitions to be ...”

“... to ethnic group, Nuer here, Shilluk there, Dinka further on, around huge trucks groaning under the weight of piled-up furniture. You can hear every kind of story here. Maida, a young Shilluk woman born in Khartoum, is on her way with her mother and two kids to Tonja, some 80 kilometres upstream. Her husband, also a Shilluk, is a soldier in the SPLA, the former ...”

“... shared. But the occasion did provide one perfect vignette of the Thatcher era:The bishops included Richard Harries, the new bishop of Oxford, at that time a frequent broadcaster on Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, to which Mrs Thatcher usually listened. As he recalled, ‘Mrs Thatcher welcomed us very graciously for drinks before lunch. “Ah,” she ...”

“... This isn’t new: there was a genre called Black Naturalism which encompassed such writers as Richard Wright, Ann Petry and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Black Naturalists found naturalism a ready-made mode for representing life under white supremacy. For many Black Americans, there was always a boundary in sight, setting a limit on how prosperous they could ...”

“... the East, with less than a quarter of the population of the Union, have anything like the relative weight of the South in the United States, not to speak of the political leverage of the region at federal level. For the moment, the effect of enlargement has essentially been much what the Foreign Office and the employers’ lobbies in Brussels always hoped it ...”

“... presented, Blood for Oil misdescribes what a single commodity – despite oil’s unique political weight – can actually represent in relation to larger structural imperatives. This is not the same as saying that the Blood for Oil argument is crudely reductive. It is true that there are almost too many other plausible ways of framing the Iraq invasion: as an ...”

“... can bring power to the office by their own efforts. Johnson tried in the early days, throwing his weight around in the Democratic caucus in the Senate as though nothing had changed. He was politely, and then less politely, ignored. He discovered he had no personal weapons to threaten anyone with; all he had was the authority of the president. Kennedy, having ...”

“... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”