“... a few ironies. Until the fatwah issued by the late Ayatollah Khomeini (a fatwah, we learn, that may be non-rescindable in consequence of his death) anyone who disliked or resented Muslim immigrants in Britain axiomatically disliked Salman Rushdie, who was and is one of their stoutest defenders. Until the fatwah, the secular Left had been reconsidering some ...”

“... rôle s’arrête là.’ Indeed he ‘is really sorry for the extent to which this intransigence may be unhelpful and awkward for you as publisher’. The paragraph ends with a clarification that is also an imperative: ‘One must take him as he is.’ This determination to establish rules for relationships emerges again and again in the second volume of ...”

“... in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men. This invocation mirrors the opening of The Second Defence, where he describes how he ‘accepted, of those very deliverers of the country, and by general consent, the part spontaneously assigned ...”

“... system attempts to demarcate everything sharply, menacingly and in a hurry. For example, there may or may not have been something called the ‘Akwizgran Discrepancy’. A forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore suggested that when the new Kingdom of Belgium emerged in 1831 – much to the annoyance of the Congress ...”

“... billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner … for the benefit of the Iraqi ...”

“... party position in Fujian. Sheridan says Xi ‘never went down well with the Fujianese’, which may be true, but the posting served his political rise. Over seventeen years, he worked his way up to become first secretary in the provincial capital, Fuzhou, just in time for an economic upturn in the city, before being made governor of the province. His record ...”

“... and his ingenious use of the materials to hand make the book something of a tour de force. He may at times overreach himself in his desire to overturn the conventional ‘wisdom’, and not all his claims will withstand critical scrutiny, but these are comparatively small flaws which scarcely detract from the magnitude of his accomplishment. Foucault is ...”

“... workers, impoverished miners, people who are less concerned with the idea that their nation-state may have become a job-lot than they are with physical safety, food and livelihood, all of which Executive Outcomes has reinstated for tens of thousands of non-combatants in Africa. Yet no one would disagree that it is first and last a mercenary force, however ...”

“... the interstate highway system and warned about the growth of the military-industrial complex. It may be rash to invite such bold comparisons.The jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them ...”

“... law of narrative order’ as an adequate way of construing the meaning of a life. Babies may be seen to entail stories because they embody the tyranny of linear causation – ‘first this happened and then that happened.’ They mock our sense of possibility. Like murders, they tell us that what’s done cannot be undone. They foreclose choice and ...”

“... institution once held her in his hands, made casts of her body, and articulated her skeleton. They may be intended as evidence, but they look more like trophies; either way, they are invitations to work backwards, to find out what the child’s life was, and how, in death, she came to be here.She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian ...”

“... no English prose writer since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of demolition. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1928, he ...”

“... Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on 9 May and my brother’s too, though he is three years older than I am. The coincidence is always good for a laugh, particularly when it dawns that we must both have been conceived during the old August Bank Holiday, sex confined to the holidays perhaps, or ...”

“... work To London or to India came home to die, Or came from London every spring To look at the may-blossom in the park. ‘While there has been some ingenious critical discussion about the extent to which the Old Man is an unreliable narrator,’ Foster declares, ‘his evocation of Coole expresses the playwright’s own emotions.’ Yet even if Coole was ...”

“... century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even ...”