“... students – clearly infantilised by their milieu, despite being in their mid-twenties – may be sorely tested. Is this a novel of ideas, or a novel about people who like to talk about ideas? I suspect the latter. And yet I wasn’t sure if it was the ideas or the people that made the book veer wildly between the entertaining and the banal. The ...”

“... wondered what had happened to the stipulation by Balfour that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ By and large, though, the tone was robustly self-satisfied, with plaudits for Israel and Britain in equal measure. Lord Turnberg (Labour): ‘Israel owes an enormous ...”

“... scholars now think, what gave rise to the Scythian story? Given the absence of Pictish texts, we may never know.In addition to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Brady’s sources include two other Latin texts and two in Middle Irish. Gildas, a sixth-century Briton, wrote On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain less as a historian than as a ...”

“... spent years tracking them. But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. This last claim may be true enough: Murphy, de Acosta and Garland were all formidable women, largely unacquainted with self-pity. But not only is Cohen being a bit perverse – the salvage operation here is grand and thrilling – she sounds a tiny bit wishful too. Her ...”

“... Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco as tribal ecstasy rite cried out for her always-on receptivity and rapid insight. Instead she piled on the ...”

“... to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say ...”

“... Sartre – for or against? Raymond Aron – for or against? … Should we take a blowtorch to May 1968 and its ideas … seen now as incomprehensible, elitist, dangerous and anti-democratic? Have the protagonists of that revolution … all become little bourgeois capitalist pleasure seekers without faith or principles, or haven’t they? … The father ...”

“... wouldn’t have been any fuss at all if it had been his mother claiming the boy not his father. 7 May. I’m coming to the end of Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel supposedly based on his friend and associate Allan Bloom. I’m never entirely comfortable with (and never unaware of) Bellow’s style, which puts an almost treacly patina on the prose ...”

“... he was on a plane to Belgrade, although five years remained on his prison sentence. Radoman, who may have been flipped, becoming an informant for Serbian intelligence, or may even have been one all along, soon flew to Valencia, where he owned an apartment. When he got there, he found more than 200 kg of cocaine, stashed by ...”

“... by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming fact’ is that ‘everyone on this earth ...”

“... We are trying to restart the engines On wings of song. The pilot giggles posthumously – ‘You may kiss my hond,’ he drawls, for the last time Holding a hond out to be kissed from this page. (Sound of ...”

“... and not the population as a whole being involved in their interpretation. These disadvantages may in any case be overstated. The laws after all are so old, centuries have worked on their interpretation, even their interpretation has in a sense become codified, and while there is surely room still for interpretation, it will be quite limited. Moreover, the ...”

“... the hand of history on my shoulder. I’d been at the first protest in that year of protests. In May, Godard and Truffaut led demonstrations at the Cannes Film Festival in support of what was happening in Paris. Les événements had begun. When I got back I edited the film we had shot. The BBC were confused. To the political programmes, it was a story about ...”

“... all be going We are in the north of the country And in the eastern part I forget which country It may come back to me, perhaps not What time does that make it You are asleep now, surely – I want you inside of me I beg your pardon Was that you What was that you said There are birds out there singing It is the depth of night What kind of birds sing at this ...”

“... to fight in distant lands when America’s chief war-businessman commands. Ulster Protestants may be the last to gladly claim the British name. Britain is still that irregular archipelago to which Pytheas ...”