“... for publicity and enthusiasm for the pantomime of statesmanship, only Holbrooke’s nemesis, Henry Kissinger, compares. Since his death at the age of 69 in 2010, Holbrooke has become the totem of an American foreign policy establishment now fallen into disarray, less for any genuine achievement than for the ideals he represented – above all the notion ...”

“... In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus ...”

“... devoted friends in America would admit that she is not the most gracious or grateful of partners. Henry Kissinger, a leading advocate of the strategic partnership with Israel, had this to say on Israeli negotiating tactics: ‘In the combination of single-minded persistence and convoluted tactics, the Israelis preserve in the interlocutor only those last ...”

“... to relieve it, and all passions there came down to dollars in the end. For Baudelaire, long before Henry Miller’s air-conditioned nightmare, the United States were a gaslit wasteland. The universal exhibitions held in Paris, with their monstrous displays of American machines and technological knowhow, added to the portentous image. Civilisation was clearly ...”

“... for a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set ...”

“... the 19th century. Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he ...”

“... movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of private ...”

“... midnight phone-calls from the President – because of his unwillingness to challenge corporate power and confront the economic insecurities that trouble the rest of the country. The pork barrel is the classic American synecdoche for political graft, and the chapter on the Pentagon in Washington Babylon is called ‘Pork Central’. Pork is not just a ...”

“... mistaking electoral politics, or party politics in a narrow sense, or even the occupancy of state power, as constituting the ground of modern politics itself … Especially in societies of our kind, the sites on which power is constituted will be enormously varied.’Why do so many people seem to consent to their own ...”

“... Rothschilds pleaded with the Times to tone down its rabid Germanophobia, both the foreign editor, Henry Wickham Steed, and the proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, denounced this ‘dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality’. Yet such unpleasantness hardly disposes of the possibility that there were immanent ...”

“... Magician is a sort of companion volume to The Master (2004), Tóibín’s celebrated novel about Henry James, and a book similarly preoccupied by the thought that what might normally be construed as psychological damage can turn out to be just what a novelist needs. This is partly a matter of a similarly subterranean homosexual life that never realises ...”

“... he seated himself.’ In the excitements of M.R. James’s golden time, which was also that of Henry James, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, all the way from a remote and violent past, was to participate. In the first scene of the first act of Hamlet, this ghost is awaited. The watchers are stationed on the ‘platform’ of the castle of Elsinore. The ...”

“... Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and ...”

“... its own vocabulary and organised into a discrete ontological formation. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Michel-Rolph Trouillot insisted that ‘history is the fruit of power but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes ...”

“... as many pages are dedicated to the three years 1977-79, when Deng was manoeuvring towards supreme power, as to the ten from 1979 to 1989, when the economic reforms with which he is usually credited were introduced. The conventional judgment is that these were his principal achievement as a ruler, and one might have expected them to loom equally large in ...”