“... schemes to hijack a delivery of uranium. With the uranium Egypt will atom-bomb a defenceless Israel. Only one man can track down Hassan – Nat Dickstein, unprepossessing, middle-aged Mossad agent, son of an East End cobbler. He is helped by a beautiful girl who finds herself in the final scenes alone at sea with the villain. She risks her life and her ...”

“... solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and Cambodia. It also ...”

“... being charitable, Dickens. And I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me about Alma’s trip to Israel for her Bat Mitzvah, where her grandparents, Bubbe and Zeyde, look after her. At the Dead Sea, Bubbe appraises Alma: ‘You don’t have a bosom? Vat happened?’ At the Wailing Wall, grandmother and granddaughter place their prayers in the cracks of the ...”

“... a name-check in the Bible. The first Book of Samuel tells the story of Saul, the anointed King of Israel who had failed to show sufficient ferocity in the persecution of God’s enemies. After several years of undistinguished kingship he found himself facing military humiliation at the hands of the Philistines, and applied to God for explanations and ...”

“... boarding schools, bricklaying, postpunk fanzine production and hand-to-mouth endeavours in Israel and Germany – to publish, in her early fifties, a pair of novels that made her the talk of Brooklyn. The first of them, The Wallcreeper (2014), was written in three weeks in order to make a point to ...”

“... of Kuwait, Amnesty put out an eighty-page document. Twenty-three years have gone by since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Amnesty has yet to produce as comprehensive a single report on Israeli abuses against Palestinians. Why the urgency only in the case of Kuwait? Although the use of torture in the occupied territories has been ...”

“... the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in ...”

“... that this wife believes her husband would not hide her.’ The couple in question ‘ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hassidic’. They’re visiting Florida from Jerusalem to see elderly parents for Sukkot. Their hosts are irreligious parents of a teenage son – the pot’s his. The two wives were friends in high school and arranged this ...”

“... Marcus is a writer in an antique mode: the modern. Even those writers of his cohort, such as Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, who publicly cursed the prophets Gaddis, Barthelme, Barth and Coover, forsaking the structural feints and syntactical feats of the 1960s and 1970s, would be mauled by the millennium, by a bearish market more interested in ...”

“... alone in holding this view, but it flies in the face of the evidence collected by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion.* Texts from many sources show that ‘quasi-biological’ classifications in regard to skin colour, lineage and religion were in place in the 16th century ‘in ways that illuminate the ...”

“... himself gained immense popularity and legitimacy in the process. But his regime lost the Sinai to Israel in 1967 and, in order to get it back, his successor, Anwar Sadat, prostrated Egypt before the United States. It has remained a depressed client state to this day. Sadat increased his own freedom of action by encouraging the army to develop its economic ...”

“... trusted the other, and they did not always co-operate as they were supposed to. Over Palestine/Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, Britain held intelligence back from the Americans because the two countries were ‘at loggerheads’. There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and ...”

“... Holocaust, by letting Kehlmann apostrophise it, leaving Franzen himself free to pontificate about Israel/Palestine with a sophistication that would barely pass muster on a local network affiliate, let alone on CNN. But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he ...”

“... than an hour on a story.’ The emphasis is on catching what people say accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, ‘our role is attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the government says Saddam has WMD, that’s what the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a huge proportion ...”

“... much to the published research of two Russian chemists, Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov, and to Jonathan Tucker’s 2006 book War of Nerves. Tabun and sarin were manufactured at factories in Beketovka, but the Soviet programme lagged behind that of the US. The Soviet equivalent of Porton Down and the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland was the State Scientific ...”