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“... Paul Johnson does not, as they say, need much introduction. Whatever one thinks of his opinions, one has to admire his frenetic energy. From 1955 to 1970 he poured forth strong left-wing views in the New Statesman, and since then has moved to pouring forth strong right-wing views in a whole host of publications, books and speeches ...”

“... scant acknowledgment to her; and if they have all added a few extra pebbles to the cairn, Jonathan Israel now comes along with a massive concrete block. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 comprises half a million words of evidence for a systematic underground movement of progressive thought that formed itself around Spinoza ...”

“... North London professional-academic, and what was then called progressive. We were all admirers of Israel, as were the newspapers and magazines we read, the Guardian and the New Statesman. In the early 1960s, when I read Hecht’s memoir, the only support for Palestinians in the London press came from the romantic Tory Spectator, then edited by Ian ...”

“... of conservative Yiddish readers when he asserts the superiority of Bashevis’s elder brother, Israel Joshua Singer, who died in 1944 at the age of 50. For readers ignorant of Yiddish, even the brothers’ names are confusingly similar; Sinclair distinguishes them as ‘Bashevis’ and ‘Joshua’, in which I’ll follow him. Most people, however, will ...”

“... have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’. Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and ...”

“... has made. The answer is that while it has not greatly changed the outlines of the story as told by Paul Johnson, Hugh Thomas and a succession of memoirists, it begins to make possible a different type of account. It is only a beginning because the parallel French, Israeli, Egyptian and even, with very considerable exceptions, American papers are either not yet ...”

“... such things. Turkey and Qatar also support the rebellion for reasons of political advantage; and Israel is interested in prolonging the war, though not in assuring the victory of jihadists. It makes Israel shine more brightly as America’s sole reliable partner in a region sinking into devastation. A New York Times story ...”

“... nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell Hassan ...”

“... all likelihood James the Just, sometimes referred to as the brother of Jesus. Their arch-enemy was Paul – probably the Preacher of Lies of the Scrolls – who led the believers in Jesus beyond the pale of Jewish law and Jewish national identity. ‘Both movements used the same vocabulary,’ Eisenman and Wise contend, alluding to the supposed Qumran ...”

“... too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and Paul Auster sent between July 2008 – a month after Kannemeyer’s approach – and August 2011. This extraordinary book comes with no explanations other than the flap copy: Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had been ...”

“... turtles.’ The turtles kettled the marchers to the east. I heard a libertarian carrying a Ron Paul sign discuss capitalism with a socialist. Could a pizza oven be owned by everyone who cooked and served the pizzas? Then it started to rain. One group of stalwarts danced up Tampa Street. The turtles marched away, singing ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’. Somebody ...”

“... out of defeat and despair; in the apocalyptic writings Yahweh’s great scheme of redemption for Israel became enlarged world-wide, and was mixed up inextricably with astrology, angelology, demonology, and doctrines of the after-life and a last judgment. An ‘enlargement’ of prophecy, I have called these writings: yet I find it impossible to read them ...”

“... to make sense of it all. At least, Naomi Shepherd starts out that way, though her thirty years in Israel have led her to a grave, almost pessimistic outlook. London-bred, Oxford-educated, she became the Israel correspondent for the New Statesman in the Sixties, under John Freeman’s editorship: it was then possible to see ...”

“... as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time native Islamists, aware of their weakness in the ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”