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“... of the Zionist movement realised that they could not achieve their aim without inducing, by one means or another, a large number of Arabs to leave Palestine. In their public utterances the Zionist leaders avoided as far as possible any mention of transfer, but in private discussions they could be brutally frank. So it is from private rather than public ...”

“... professional historians may dispute the fact, have to have a point in the present, and it is by no means clear what this point, for the Social Democrats, should be In 1981 and 82, in the first flush of success, it might have seemed that it was to explain the beginning of the breaking of the misnamed mould. But in 1984, although there is no certain sign that ...”

“... was not at all opposed to the censorship of his time. ‘Let us have a strict censorship by all means, but not a senseless one,’ he writes to a friend, as if strictness (strogost) were a cosy and reassuring fact of Russian life, as it might be in England village cricket or well-rolled umbrellas. How else explain the perverse logic of the business, on the ...”

“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... about the physical signs of subjective states, but they also remind us that ‘character’ means both personality, and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare ...”

“... truthful, exempt from any compromising association with white privilege – is to be seen as one means by which that hegemony has been ratified and maintained. The range, vividness and significance of this work are well represented in Arthur Little’s collection White People in Shakespeare, a book whose ideas have only been sharpened by the fact that there ...”

“... threat – whether in the form of terrorism, instability or simply an affront to conscience – means that states which are increasingly open, trusting and interdependent in their relations with each other may have to be closed, decisive and relatively tough in their dealings with others. The task is to know when to get in and when to get out of the ...”

“... is a proof of the regard of God for the happiness of mankind,’ says Johnson,‘that the means by which it must be attained, are obvious and evident.’ Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), whose views Johnson often accepted, said it was as absurd to mistake plain right and wrong as it would be ‘for a man in arithmetical matters, ignorantly to believe that ...”

“... Hughes’s novel, Where I Used to Play on the Green, won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Fiction Prize in 1982, yet it received not a tenth of the publicity awarded to winners of the Booker and the Whitbread. This is a pity, for it is a fine achievement, although too dour a story to command affection in the media. It reminds us not only ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... students loved him. Modern critics – especially Scottish ones – have been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward ...”

“... band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the ...”

“... from the information desk. It reads: ‘The gallery’s displays have recently been changed, which means you can view works from the Tate collection in exciting new ways.’ New ways? Blue spectacles? Upside down? The notion that curatorial skill in rearranging the stamp album will alter your view of the Cubist painting you have always known and want to see ...”

“... In these sittings it happens to be me, but for Julia Auerbach, Jake Auerbach, Catherine Lampert, David Landau (and the predecessors, most notably Gerda, Estella Olive West and Juliet Yardley Mills) – for all of us – the role is practically the same. We are there to enable him to perform. We keep him occupied. Drawing is the concern. Drawing voluminously ...”