“... circle for an attack on Iran. It is generally supposed that Gates, together with Condoleezza Rice, held Cheney off and gave Bush the institutional backing to resist him. Obama by all reports has become friendly with Gates – they share a certain reserve and an image of themselves as temperate and moderate-minded public men. He has shown no such signs with ...”

“... abuses, let alone the Rabaa massacre or the mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist ...”

“... Palmier’s sombre encyclopedia of exile, published in French in 1987 and now translated by David Fernbach, offers seemingly endless evidence of the ways in which exile often punished over and over again those who fled Germany after 1933. One story is symptomatic. Hans Bendgens-Henner, a pacifist refugee who had first settled in Holland, was expelled ...”

“... novel. But Lin doesn’t do anything cute with the names: he uses them as straightforwardly as David Foster Wallace uses X and Y in ‘Octet #6’, for example, or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader ...”

“... determined what happened in the icy Baltic waters on 30 January 1945, stories that are themselves held at arm’s length by the narrative’s framing device. The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff marks the literal start of the narrator’s tangled personal life, and in turn becomes a means of reflecting on the ways in which history is remembered and made. The ...”

“... it’s just possible that there were three. The other place in the UK where the Labour vote held up much better than expected was London, and London is another place where Labour can claim to be in opposition, to Boris Johnson’s do-nothing, know-nothing mayoral administration. I wouldn’t want to make too many claims for the contribution this role ...”

“... an upper-class socialist. He liked cricket, bridge (with, among others, the ‘Machiavellian’ David Sylvester), chess (with Martin Amis, who felt humbly as if he always had, or anyway always ought to have, the black pieces). Women found him instantly attractive. And he rode a motor bike. The illustrations here are more than adequate reminders of his dash ...”

“... Nevertheless, the way the police act in such moments can be studied for intimations of commonly held attitudes, the assumptions and expectations that exist before and after these deadly confrontations. One looks for something else in the videos too: intimations of the wider culture, a culture in which many of us consume violent images all the time, on ...”

“... in New York in 1915. His father, Bennett Siegelstein, who had grown up (alongside Eddie Cantor and David Sarnoff) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a prominent lawyer, as well as the founder and former chairman of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged in Brooklyn. He had championed Romanian Jews, held seders, and ...”

“... conspiracy. He rejected the French Catholic and nationalist brand of anti-semitism which held that Jewishness was a matter of religion, in favour of the view adopted by the Nazis that Jewishness was a matter of race. He was now a public figure, seen by those of like mind as a coming man and lampooned by liberal opponents as a pretentious buffoon. He ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”

“... doing in Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery? Looking at her face in a mirror held for her by Cupid. Or so it seems to me; also to every visitor to the Gallery whose opinion I have sought, and to the mid-17th-century compiler of the inventory of paintings belonging to the picture’s first owner, Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán. But ...”

“... forced to fight on alone without any official communal support. The outstanding figure here was David Salomons, whose repeated efforts as a professing Jew to obtain election to the Court of Aldermen of the City of London was rewarded in 1845 with an Act which allowed Jews to hold any municipal office. After the passage of this law, it was clear that only ...”

“... were arguing vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”