“... now in power in Baghdad is as sectarian, corrupt and dysfunctional as Saddam’s ever was. There may be less state violence, but only because the state is weaker. Its methods are equally brutal: Iraqi prisons are full of people who have made false confessions under torture or the threat of it. An Iraqi intellectual who had planned to open a museum in Abu ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but one’s kindred, whoever cares enough about the work to guard it responsibly. James, though, may have taken a certain pleasure in entrusting his relatives per damnationem with his art, given that it was the very thing that had estranged him from them. And knowing that Harry, an accomplished lawyer and historian, would take over from Alice, James honoured ...”

“... isn’t really a riddle at all, doesn’t mean our puzzlement is a poorly advised response. It may be all we have, and it is certainly all we have if we can’t resist tuning our minds to what puzzles us. All four of the novels DeLillo has published since Underworld – The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007) and now Point Omega ...”

“... you to sink your ships within six hours.’ Otherwise, the Royal Navy would ‘use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships falling into German or Italian hands’. Negotiations proceeded throughout the morning of 3 July, and Somerville extended the deadline for a French decision from 1.30 to 3 p.m. The deadline was relaxed again when Gensoul ...”

“... melancholia and mania without fever, as Soranus of Ephesus and Aretaeus of Cappadocia did, they may well have been describing fluctuations of psychotic agitation unrelated to mood swings. Bipolarity in the modern sense could not have emerged until it became possible to identify mood disorders without delirium or intellectual disorders; in other words, it ...”

“... are responsible for all our woes,’ we might be anywhere from Diyarbakir to Delhi. The remark may be designed to raise a smile, but Osman’s anger at meddlesome foreigners is sincere, and more than justified. In 1973, Daud topples his cousin in a republican coup, only to turn against his leftist allies and lose his life in a Communist coup in 1978. After ...”

“... introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her work in his life. May Swenson told Bishop that, when reading some of her poems, ‘I have to furnish them with “meanings” from my own experience because you’ve left yours out.’ Tóibín is drawn to similar furnishings: ‘I have a close relationship with silence, with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the original plan A, which involved lending the government of George Papandreou €110 billion in May last year in return for a promise to cut government spending and increase tax revenue, both by unprecedented amounts. The joint European Central Bank-EU-IMF loan was necessary because, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, Greece was exposed as ...”

“... disregard for the rule of international law. He quotes General Mike Jackson, who toured Basra in May 2003 after the victory over Saddam. ‘It is startlingly apparent,’ Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and is expected.’ Jackson was encouraged to keep his concerns to himself, since this was ...”

“... Curll, the Royalist Bishop of Winchester before the city fell to Cromwell in 1645. The truth may have been more prosaic, but like much else Curll’s background remains obscure. The main source for his early life is a malevolent biography by an unidentified ‘J.H.’, which offers copious back-handed praise (he ‘shew’d an early Inclination to ...”

“... devastation have left us almost as remote from the Edwardians as Muthesius was from Dürer, we too may at times feel like a curious traveller in this distant England, fascinated by minutiae. He explains the things that no contemporary English writer needed to mention and draws the reader deep into the texture of the domestic past. He explains how those ...”

“... be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat has upped sticks without leaving a ...”