“... Psychoanalysis is a human science that courts its own ruin, but won’t abandon its quest for laws. ‘Freud’s vision of the conscious mind perched precariously and parasitically on the outer surface of an implacable unconscious had its grandeur,’ Malcolm Bowie writes in his introduction to An Outline of Psychoanalysis. ‘But the disproportion ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... but it’s still the case that the costing of the proposals looks shaky. It didn’t help that David Cameron got his Boden knickers in a twist about whether or not the Tories are going to subsidise marriage through the tax system. The sight of the Tories beginning to flounder in this area prompts a dark thought. I’ve argued that economic constraints are ...”

“... into the reading room.’ And it’s used defensively, to protect her privacy. ‘Have written to David Godwin pretending not to understand exactly and hope that will keep him at bay.’ After Offshore, Fitzgerald wrote six more novels, of which two more were nominated for the Booker. Since her death in 2000 it has become common to talk of her as one of the ...”

“... to be the command structure responsible for pre-genocidal killings of Tutsis. Habyarimana’s in-laws were said to run the akazu and while I didn’t accuse President Habyarimana himself, I did point an incriminating finger at his wife, Agathe, and her brothers, accusing them of organising massacres of the ‘Tutsis of the interior’, as the oppressed ...”

“... well. Sometimes things that I didn’t understand Charlie would explain to me: the harsh ways and laws of the life [in Paddington], such as the things people were respected and despised for.’ He and his friends were ‘always fighting and shouting … I heard this clinking in his jacket; it was a knuckleduster and I took it out; next day he came back with ...”

“... basic humanitarian values which can come into conflict, and sometimes contradiction, with national laws. As I learned repeatedly in a recent stint of reporting in Russia, this is anathema to those who, like the Russians, cling to the Westphalian model of the sovereign nation state as protection against the depredations of Nato, now the only force able to ...”

“... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...”

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... he acts, has already ceded his victim too much power. ‘Honour,’ Lama Abu-Odeh writes, citing David Gilmore, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’ ‘We are men,’ the killers in Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers say, ‘but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by ...”

“... and beside himself with anxiety about how to look after his six remaining children and his in-laws. How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how, despite it all, he kept writing, would seem almost a miracle of fortitude were it not for the suspicion that his creative life required him to ...”