“... precedent has been set, and a new regional order has emerged, based on uncontested domination by a small state that continues to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence with impunity, led by a man who is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. The war with Iran is far more than an attempt to prevent ...”

“... New Labour alike as an electoral masterstroke, it offered a life-changing fortune to a relatively small group of people, a group that, not by coincidence, contained a large number of swing voters.Right to Buy differed from the period’s other privatisations in many ways. It was tightly linked to the buyer’s personal use of the asset being privatised. If ...”

“... to free up beds that, as Wendy Warren witnessed, porters would rouse patients with dementia in the small hours to rush them off to some part of the county where a community bed had become available. Even after the Royal Infirmary got a new, bigger A&E building in April 2017, at a cost of £48 million, the Warrens found themselves waiting outside it in the back ...”

“... Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... all as far as Brandon’s girlfriends were concerned.’ Indeed it may have been the draw. In the small-town rural America where Teena lived, male crime passed effortlessly down the generations. ‘You keep seeing the same faces,’ Judge Robert Finn told John Gregory Dunne, who wrote about the case in 1997. ‘I’m into third-generation domestic abuse and ...”

“... can bullshit the American people, but they can’t bullshit us.’ As many countries pulled their small numbers of troops out of Iraq, I heard the State Department announce it would no longer use the phrase ‘Coalition of the Willing’. I heard that of the 40 water and sewage systems in Iraq, ‘not one is being operated properly.’ I heard that of the 19 ...”

“... Mutually Assured Destruction: ‘Even if you’re for Pacifism, you’re a communist. They are so small-minded that they can’t give anyone credit for wanting life and peace even more than world-domination. I get stared at in horror when I suggest that we are as guilty in this as Russia is; that we are warmongers too.’ Legions of teenagers, and not only ...”

“... the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was 36 years her senior. And then there is the small matter of incest. Much interest in this was fuelled by incidents in Thomas Mann’s own work. In her useful and sympathetic book about the Mann family, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss writes: ‘Just how much Katia and Klaus Pringsheim ...”

“... new internal discipline, resulted in prices rebounding to $30 a barrel, but in real terms this was small beer. In response, Cheney’s Energy Task Force did no more than recapitulate an argument made by Jimmy Carter: demand is growing, oil is not scarce, but it is unevenly distributed. Carter had emphasised conservation, at least in the first instance, as a ...”

“... will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the ...”

“... rage over immigration; an anachronistic constitutional order that gives far too much power to small states. All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be – if, indeed, it ...”

“... social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of ...”

“... of the images d’Epinal – the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Wenceslas Square, the Crown of St Stephen; the liberator Pope, the philosopher President, the Nobel electrician – with which the media could uplift audiences in the West. Kadare might be a better writer than Havel, but apart from a few readers in France, who cared? No Montenegrin estate lay ...”