“... selfishness and violent behaviour at the National” was what convinced Harold to vote Tory in May. I too voted Tory but that was quite unashamedly in order to see a woman walk into No. 10. Neither of us knew much about Mrs Thatcher’s politics.’ She got her wish, Mrs Thatcher did walk through the door of No. 10, but ‘subsequently, Harold, by his own ...”

“... be helped with. ‘Character’, on the other hand, is about people helping themselves. Purnell may fade away (we live in hope). The danger is that whoever is leading the Labour Party in five or ten years’ time, or whenever it next wins office, will look, and speak, very much as he ...”

“... by contrast with Korda’s roman à clef insinuation, and are so distressing that comparison may seem odious. But some of the same questions apply. Suppose Olivier had romped in private with the whole of London Zoo, would this be something we needed to know? We’d love to know, of course. Though we surely accept that the art, the work, the well-spring ...”

“... Attempts at description are stupid,’ George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane? Anne Carson Funny you should mention a crow. For years light … for years light eluded me or stayed only a short time … something … what was it … heavy in me … a weight I couldn’t put down … How will you let her go, the girl with the high ponytail and all the wishes, the flooded tremendous wishes … ? In the valley there was a crystal shop and, they said, a lot of healers ...”

“... be able to communicate with other humans merely by thinking to each other. Speech, as we know it, may well become obsolete . . . We will not need to remember anything . . . We will even be able to relive memories that we didn’t have in the first place . . . Of course it doesn’t mean everyone has to become a cyborg . . . But be warned . . . those who ...”

“... in Victorian times, when children respected their elders and knew their place; that their place may have been halfway up a chimney or down a coalmine is tactfully overlooked. ‘The root cause of anti-social behaviour,’ Field says, ‘stems from the failure of some families to promote a set of common decencies, which centre on a proper consideration of ...”

“... was a passion. It was to do with recovering lost worlds from the fragments left to us, and critics may well be right to link this passion to the early deaths of both his parents. It can be life’s greatest blessing to stumble on a vocation whose rhythm fits so nicely with one’s most secret preoccupations. It can also be a curse.Even in Tolkien’s ...”

“... Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal ...”

“... and the fate of the Jews. But the lessons I draw from them, the ways I see them combined, may not – by the end – be those most obviously expected. Because of Dreyfus, therefore Israel. It is an argument that many find unanswerable: the crimes perpetrated by the French state against the Jewish officer heralded, for those who could hear, the end of ...”

“... Julius was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s ...”

“... that it is a ‘last word’ not only because that is what a woman always has, but because it may be in a sense the last word this woman will ever speak: Teach me, only teach, Love!     As I ought I will speak thy speech, Love,     Think thy thought – In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, Browning engineered a reversal from what looked like ...”

“... physical assaults. By the spring of 1950 the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure. For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East’s most ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo ...”

“... my life, and the hopeless flirtations with chance in roulette and dice don’t interest me. There may be a thrill to be had playing those games in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas, but it requires some suspension of disbelief to feel the glamour ‘doing your money’ amid the plastic fittings and bus-seat upholstery of a casino in Wolverhampton or the Edgware ...”

“... ways, Ober believes, Athens was the Google of the ancient world. And if this is true, then we may need to reconsider our other reservations about the democratic nature of the wisdom of crowds as well. Perhaps we are wrong to assume that democracy in the modern world can’t be much more than a popularity contest. And if so, perhaps we should also stop ...”

“... of breadth. When historians or geographers exhibit false accounts of places far distant, they may be forgiven, because they can tell but what they are told … but Boethius lived at no great distance; if he never saw the lake, he must have been very incurious, and if he had seen it, his veracity yielded to very slight temptations. Apparently unable to ...”