“... from elsewhere: before 1979 it paid millions to the US for fuel that was never delivered. In May 2010 Iran signed a deal with Turkey, mediated by Brazil, to send a portion of its low-enriched uranium stockpile abroad in exchange for 120kg of highly enriched nuclear fuel rods for the Tehran reactor. The deal ultimately collapsed, however, and talks in ...”

“... from Jefferson’s speeches to the rhetoric of abolitionism; even ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ may glance at an earlier line from the poem, about ‘starr’d and spangled courts’. In England, the Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus reached ordinary readers in a broadsheet version distributed free by the Society for Constitutional Information (it purged the ...”

“... in September 2001 is an example of the way in which a single symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potentially lethal nature of Balkan ...”

“... as Virginia Woolf invents in Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe, who stages a history of England, may have been modelled on Edith Craig, the artist daughter of Ellen Terry, who designed some of the movement’s banners. When he created the spectacular story of the nation for the opening of the Olympic Games, Danny Boyle rightly included a glimpse – it was ...”

“... is also true that I am not competent to restore it./Neither is there candour, and here I may be of some use.’ When you look at her earlier collections, especially the very candid Ararat (1990), it’s tempting to assume the worst of her childhood: we find murdered children, drowned children, ghostly infant sisters, children starved (almost ...”

“... it might be a dictatorship, it was an enlightened and progressive one. As for Egypt, Anthony Eden may have described Nasser as ‘that Hitler on the Nile’, but after the 1978 Camp David Accords the country became a pillar of American interests in the Middle East and – by its withdrawal from the Arab-Israeli conflict – an unwitting enabler of the ...”

“... an embarrassment of empirical riches these days. We have assembled huge datasets, to which experts may devote superlative statistical care. Yet the field hasn’t been overrun by stodgy accountants. Indeed, much of the theoretical activity contributed by professional cosmologists these days looks more bizarre than ever, even absurd. Of course, neither ...”

“... writes, ‘he would wake abruptly from the recurrent nightmare that he had killed her’. ‘May my life’s work make good for my misdeed,’ he wrote in his late forties. The father made the son expose the mother’s desire: Reich devoted his professional life to exposing everyone’s desire, but in Freud’s name. When he was 17 his father, having ...”

“... response to the death of tonality, and to the death of ‘expressiveness’ it enacted. This may be my ignorance of music – I’m easily overpowered. With Richter there can be no such certainty. I cannot imagine a viewer emerging from the rooms at Tate Modern and being sure that Richter’s endless hovering around the fact of the photograph – his ...”

“... Cortés’s bloodthirsty captain responsible for the massacre of Aztecs in the Templo Mayor on 22 May 1520, during their celebration of the Feast of Toxcatl.In October 1990, Octavio and Marie-José and a group of Mexican writers, including me, were in New York for the monumental exhibition Mexico: Thirty Centuries of Splendour at the Metropolitan Museum of ...”

“... members, and constant fear of denunciation. Suddenly we are in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.Drain may have become the Westboro Baptists’ St Paul – the convert who stiffens the creed and seizes control – but he is a ludicrous figure even by Westboro standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell ...”

“... rewarding supporters with patronage – tends towards mass allegiance. And threatening those who may not support populist rule with losing jobs or benefits solves the problem of how to exert control over a society without too much direct repression. Such dynamics are what the sociologist Bálint Magyar has in mind when he refers to the rise of a ‘mafia ...”

“... always needed​ to have books around me, quantities of them, ever since I can remember. There may be something pathological about it. When I was a boy, the eldest child of literate but not bibliophile parents, in a big enough house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture ...”

“... was in the context of a bigger argument: that if we wish to secure more convictions for rape, we may have to pay the price of lighter penalties. Her answer was also, dare I say, a little light-hearted. Is it appropriate to be light-hearted in the context of rape? Some would think not. But the audience at the lecture seems to have been happy. They clapped at ...”

“... in Essex, left his oxen long enough to walk the Pilgrims’ Way to Santiago de Compostela. He may also have visited Italy, and on his return he had an otherworld vision unique of its kind. The star attraction of his hell was a vast theatre managed by demons for their own amusement, in which the damned compulsively re-enacted their sins before being torn ...”