“... by German botanists in Cameroon, its fruit yielded a much higher percentage of oil (50 per cent by weight compared to 15 per cent for the dura oil palms favoured in Africa). Oil palm plantations spread across Malaya and Sumatra in the 1920s, but the truly colossal growth began in the 1970s, first in Malaysia and then in Indonesia. In 1970, a hundred thousand ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... us: as he writes in Book 1 of My Struggle, ‘why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?’ If someone scans an item at a till, someone else must pay for it. If someone drinks coffee, they must later wash the cup. When Knausgaard mentions an off-ramp, he must actually merge into traffic: if he doesn’t inform us when he shifts into first, he ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... well​ did Willie and Oscar know each other anyway? In the two massive Lives of Wilde, by Richard Ellmann and Matthew Sturgis, Hornung’s name is not mentioned once. Nor is there a single letter to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter ...”

“... and after 1914, and his sympathies for the abortive revolution of 1918-19: but he also gives full weight to the poet’s deep ‘Austrian’ distaste for everything ‘typically German’, especially for public life in the early days of the Weimar Republic. We read of Rilke’s admiration for T.G. Masaryk, the founder-president of Czechoslovakia, whose ...”

“... it just as forcefully. How could he consistently associate himself with Russophobes such as Richard Pipes, who want us to believe that Russians have authoritarianism stitched into their genetic code? Deep contextual insight is ostensibly what leads Cohen to dismiss foreign blueprints and game plans. Russia should develop ‘an indigenous economic ...”

“... about the ‘ineptitude of the governing statute’ – to borrow a phrase from the article by Richard Buxton QC which we cited in the Report. Some of us were very attracted to the Scottish regime, in which a single broad ground gives the Court of Appeal sufficient flexibility to quash any conviction where it believes that there was or might have been a ...”

“... the Syrian capital into an Occidental artefact. Oriental structures, struggling under the weight of satellite receivers large enough for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near destruction, a wall down here, doors falling from hinges there, prisoners shaved for execution. Posterity can lay the blame on Syria’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”