“... to rouse moral indignation by means of sensationalism. Needless to say, it does not touch on how we might alleviate the situation of those whose misfortunes it describes, still less on why they, among all the unfortunates of the world, have a first claim on our compassion and help. Certainly no English man or woman would wish to be a German Jew in Germany ...”

“... that when the army reached the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, there would be another photo op, and we would be told that the complex had been secured. By 8 April, the US army was reported to have reached the Ministry of Information, two streets away from the museum. I emailed Pentagon staff, reminding them of the importance of the museum. In reply, they asked ...”

“... It has taken the entire century to bring Freud to the judgment of history. Whatever shall we do about Jung? His beginnings were not promising and his father frankly worried about him. Dominated by a mother at once unreliable and eerily intimate, the child was an asocial miscreant, rejected by his peers. Home was no better – the atmosphere was ‘unbreathable’ – and when he could not escape to the countryside the boy began to explore his own interior ...”

“... terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.’   Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it all mean? The ...”

“... of a new map for Israel, Diaspora Jews of all denominations are always unsure of their ground: if we choose not to live there, do we have a particular right to confront, head-on, those who do? Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Relations recognised the inevitability of this tension: following Sacks’s letter, he acknowledged ...”

“... of a first meeting with a member of a previously unencountered tribe, a birder fresh from the bush. My most memorable youthful twitch was in the autumn of 1975. I was 14. At Breydon Water in Norfolk a greater yellowlegs had been found, a very rare North American wader, like an attenuated redshank, with thin straw-yellow legs, a delicate long bill and ...”

“... with his own on the question of possible military action in Iraq. Before looking at his reasons, we need to consider the case of a Foreign Office official who did resign over Iraq. In a memo dated 18 March 2003 Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office’s deputy legal adviser, who had been in the diplomatic service for 29 years, told her superiors that using ...”

“... want to spoil those good feelings by making the sharp criticisms that Obama deserves. So we are reduced, in Reed’s words, to ‘a desiccated leftism’ preoccupied with ‘making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity’. The chief electoral ...”

“... of a resignation honours list that rewarded those who – oh, dash it, I don’t know – shall we say made money rather than earned it? Anyway, in the photograph Wilson looks like nothing so much as a grinning monkey on a stick, and in the matter of the honours list he achieved the near-impossible feat of discrediting the discredited and making a ...”

“... his life, quotes the story of Ford, an over-age wartime second lieutenant, playing golf with Lloyd George and giving the PM a piece of his mind on golfing etiquette: had he refrained, he told Lowell, he ‘would have been a general of a division’. Lowell speaks of ‘lies that made the great your equals’, which identifies one major motive for ...”

“... a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as telephone chat-lines and Asian Babes magazine. We should, however, beware of the temptation to chart a nation’s moral decline through the personalities of its newspaper proprietors. Beaverbrook was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, a sturdy defender of the empire and the man who, as Churchill’s ...”

“... those who want confirmation of the obvious, ‘you can look it up.’) But what Doc said to me as we watched that scene play out 13 years ago still rings as the most prophetic warning I’ve heard about the closing decades of the 20th century: ‘Jesus, Craig, we’re all going to die or be indicted now!’ By the time ...”

“... himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’. Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his politico-religious worldview, and about the sniffiness with which he was viewed by the small, determinedly self-improving black middle class, which wasn’t at first thrilled by ...”

“... Either he had been persuaded of this by the recycled Cold Warriors clustering round the Bush administration, or they had failed to inform their ‘key ally’ of their determination to dismantle Iraq’s state and security structures. More ominously, Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting ...”

“... their animosities were great, their affections were proportionate: they, perhaps, loved, where we only pity; and were stern and inexorable, where we are not merciful, but only irresolute.’ Imbued with refinement, modern civility and humanity, 18th-century man was ‘accustomed to think of the individual with ...”