“... her tastes: her favourite author was Kipling; her second son was named after Kim. ‘“Pukka” may seem an old-fashioned, colonial word to use, but that’s how she came across,’ the Oxford academic Peter Carey, another friend, told Wintle. ‘One noticed how, every year, she was the first to get her Christmas cards out.’ But she was kind, gracious and ...”

“... would become Israel’s prime minister and withdraw the last Israeli troops from Lebanon in May 2000. On the morning after the April 1973 killings, the Lebanese lined up for and against the Palestinians. Sunni Muslims demanded that the Palestinians be allowed to defend themselves, to conduct a commando war against Israel from Lebanon and to maintain an ...”

“... I was working in the context of liberation theology, and there is one phrase in particular that may help summarise my understanding of how things stood. The Conferencia de Puebla took place in Mexico in 1979, and several liberation theologians were threatened and barred from attending. The slogan I’m thinking of ran something like this: si el pueblo no va ...”

“... Iago as her dog-faced seducer, the embittered servant De Flores. Thus the unsentimental Middleton may well have a better claim to be regarded as Shakespeare’s heir than his official successor as principal dramatist for the King’s Men, John Fletcher, the sentimental doyen of romantic tragicomedy. After Marlowe, Middleton had perhaps the most arrestingly ...”

“... Richardson, and he sang David’s praises. ‘He’s the ideal playwright. Never says a word.’5 May. Angels in America opens at the National. When I saw the original production at the Cottesloe in 1992 I found I was sitting behind Derek Jarman. I knew Derek slightly since he had been in the adaptation of Orton’s Prick Up Your Ears, and I knew, too, that ...”

“... trade and investment. Yet they are locked in a conflict which, according to President Trump, may yet result in a complete ‘uncoupling’ of the two economies. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is doing its best to sabotage the WTO, in large part because it has failed to tame China’s rise.The Covid-19 crisis has pushed into the background the ...”

“... back home, though still in its box, sulking perhaps, but occasionally giving a plaintive chime.3 May, Yorkshire. The cherry tree that my father planted just by the back door some thirty years ago is now not much more than a stump. It was radically pruned a few years back in an effort to cure the blackfly that annually infested it, making the leaves clumped ...”

“... armed forces,’ he said in mid-January. ‘If things go on as they are, Ukrainian statehood may be dealt an unendurable, very serious blow.’ In his recent interview with the Trumpist American journalist and conspiracist Tucker Carlson, Putin conspicuously failed to answer when asked several times if he was satisfied with the Ukrainian territory Russia ...”

“... of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.Israel’s methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, but this doesn’t mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that Israel has ...”

“... of borders, whether political, cultural or economic.The second way of thinking about fascism may seem more useful. Some far-right populists haven’t been content merely to display hostility to liberal democratic institutions, but have set about dismantling them. Under Viktor Orbán’s clientelist leadership in Hungary, the judiciary and media have been ...”

“... to appear, and in his papers there is the larger part of a manuscript for the 16th volume. It may perhaps be edited by Carr’s friend, Tamara Deutscher, with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus ...”

“... Updike blithely explains in the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, ‘which may help account for Janice’s lusty rejuvenation.’ ‘Can I ask you something?’ I asked the members of my Updike Support Group one by one. ‘Do you remember Rabbit Redux? Like, at all?’ What I really meant was: ‘Am I insane?’ Had I alone been ...”

“... irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home (as the refusal to go home may also be premised on the loss of home). Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality. Marusya Tatarovich, the heroine of the novel A Foreign Woman, by the Russian émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov, comes to the conclusion that ...”

“... Warren, ‘discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review’. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real document is already written: her diaries, a biography of aim. In her Journals she wished, with ...”

“... Stations of the Cross, where each episode is assigned the same pictorial weight, though pilgrims may linger longer in front of some than others.The true medium of this text is messages flying back and forth in tireless intercourse. The reader, like the characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand out for the scrap of ...”