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“... with Iraq followed in the 1990s, when Saddam Hussein gave Syria 150,000 barrels of free oil every day and allowed Syrian businesses to sell Iraqis about $1 billion worth of goods. When the US assumed control of the Iraqi side of the frontier in April, the oil and the trade stopped. Syria’s economy was in trouble. ‘By 2010,’ says Nabil Sukkar, an ...”

“... of myth and set about dismantling it and mocking it. Thus the Odyssey was reduced in Ulysses to a day’s perambulations in a half-baked city, its hero Bloom made, in a feat of genius, both anti-heroic and oddly heroic at the same time, both small in his gestures and circumstances and oddly large in the quality of what he notices and remembers, his ...”

“... in the downtown county jail. His offence was not wholly clear. The trouble began the previous day while he’d been in an overflow room at the state capitol listening in as a senate committee debated a bill to crack down on undocumented migrants. The gist of the bill was to make life impossible for anyone in Arizona without papers: impossible to drive a ...”

“... relationships between projects housed in the academy, often in the same building. Many years ago Douglas Bush and Cleanth Brooks engaged in a celebrated debate, with Bush representing the historical method and Brooks representing what was then, in fact, New Criticism. At one point Brooks made what appeared to be a conciliatory statement: ‘I say again that ...”

“... anonymous, stoked up on black coffee; ready to attack the blank pages. The rituals of the day, the pots of tea he brews in his own kitchen (coffee is for travel), the public writing spaces, are important to Drummond. If they become misaligned, if his cover is blown, he can’t return to that particular café, that area of town. On his own turf, in ...”

“... Macroeconomic Policy and Financial Regulation in Europe from the 1930s to the 1990s, edited by Douglas Forsyth and Ton Notermans – one American, the other Dutch. It retained but sharpened the idea of an international regime, specifying the variant that had prevailed before the war, resting on the gold standard; then the order forged at Bretton ...”

“... enemies of British rule in Northern Ireland. I heard Hill’s name spoken on the radio the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of five people at Guildford and another two at Woolwich. The judge recommended that he be released only in the event of grave illness or extreme old age. Paul Hill, aged 21, had in effect been sentenced to ...”

“... COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and pistol belt (but no pistol), stocked up on anti-malaria tablets, and mastered the basic vocabulary of the war: ‘in country’ as opposed to ‘The ...”

“... a pen-syringe to a Cuban contact in Paris, intended for use in assassinating Castro, on the very day in November 1963 that President Kennedy was shot. The Cubans were understandably careful with unannounced visitors bearing gifts. At the end of my trip, I was able to present Carlos Rafael with the rather sweaty Stilton, before we went on to discuss Cuba’s ...”

“... architects and (rarely) statesmen. Some sections have something of the quality of a diary or a day-book: he takes note of public events (Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden ...”

“... see too, the photographs and footage from those who went to Ground Zero of this catastrophe.Mary Douglas said that dirt is matter out of place, and petroleum is out of place everywhere above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it, and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious ...”

“... of some research on Sir Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester by Lady Douglas Sheffield. Dudley had made various half-hearted efforts to prove his legitimacy, a matter of some delicacy in that his mother was now married to another man – in fact to Sir Edward Stafford, Drury’s brother-in-law. The legalities of Dudley’s claim ...”

“... founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 essay, entitled ‘The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder’, Joseph Epstein, an undergraduate at Chicago in the Hutchins era, compared her both to Zelda Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot’s schizophrenic first ...”

“... and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. Years of protracted negotiations were to take place before the Libyan government agreed to release the two men ...”

“... decathlon, and commented as ‘her eyes rimmed red and her voice grew soft’: ‘That was a good day. But the last couple of days were better.’ It’s as if – even allowing for the additional pathos injected by Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the famous piece on Jenner for Vanity Fair – the photographic session, rather than hormones or surgery, were the ...”