“... in December 1990, Siad Barre in Somalia in January 1991 and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia in May 1991 (precipitating Eritrea’s secession). In the networks of the Islamist international, Sudan claimed credit for all this. Khartoum’s new radical Islamist government had thrown open its doors to militants from across the Muslim world. They had counted on ...”

“... reward. That is, MacArthur stakes a wager on potential: it is not what you have done, but what you may do, which is judged, or prejudged. ‘The kid will go far,’ is the message they send. Such prophecy is notoriously inaccurate. The MacArthur operation has not been going long enough for one to see how many out-and-out winners they have in fact chosen ...”

“... pleased with the accounts of your children. Perhaps the new generation in the next few years may lead to many acceptable recognitions when I am in the grave. Till I go, believe me Ella to be most affectionately Your W. Jerdan Jerdan died impoverished in 1869 in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, at the age of 88, leaving no will. I was told about the three ...”

“... word into Farsi, Kurdish and Turkish: ‘Strength to your arm, God be praised, long life to you, may you not be tired.’ I can’t explain this uniformity. I assume that blonde dolls may be popular as decoration because they are the only available legal depiction of unveiled women. (Though I’m not certain that the ...”

“... the removal of Arafat promises only to accelerate Palestinian political fragmentation, which may well increase, rather than diminish, terrorist attacks on Israel. In a ghastly way, however, that would suit Sharon, giving him the opportunity both to intensify the military occupation and to preserve the settlements as inviolate sanctuaries for innocent ...”

“... I marvel that Ford’s heady obscurantism has such defenders. But to take Ford properly to task may be to begin to be dissatisfied with cinema. Adherence to legend at the expense of facts will ruin America – the work is well under way. And lovers of the movies should consider how far film has helped the undermining. Ford is not the only culprit: Clint ...”

“... Lynch Thrale Piozzi, marginal annotation to Boswell’s Life of Johnson Here is a museum. Visitors may see in it Nero’s couch, a statue of Cerberus and a skeleton of an Ethiopian, the bones stuck with porcupine quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to Frances Thrale (dead in infancy) but in fact stolen from ...”

“... confuses me, and, after a while, frightens me to dumbness, because I know sarcasm is there.’ She may sometimes have been mistaken about the sarcasm, but only because she didn’t believe she deserved the praise, and there was pride, too, in the acknowledgment of her deficiencies: ‘Fortunately, there are other things one can do in the world besides ...”

“... Early​ in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent ...”

“... ambitions are thwarted, who has delusions of grandeur and power. If there’s a pretty maid he may ask her bluntly whose mistress she is. When he thinks he has his man he sticks to him like a limpet, waiting for him to break down. In A Man’s Head, certain that a young Czech immigrant is the guilty party but without any evidence to nail him, Maigret ...”

“... to revolt or flee. As Delany surmises, Gissing’s tendency to read life through literature may also have contributed to his early belief that Nell was fundamentally a good woman who could be redeemed (Delany suggests the influence of Rossetti’s poem ‘Jenny’, though other Victorian prostitute figures like Nancy in Oliver Twist also come to ...”

“... contrivance’, or ‘the Popish Plot Reviv’d’. Parliament came down on Locke’s side: from May 1696 the old coins would be worth no more than the metal they were made of, and in the meantime the great engines at the Mint would keep turning night and day as old coins were melted down and reminted at full weight. Given that it was going to take the ...”

“... the cause was the appalling American diet. Locating the national chronic malady in the stomach may, however, be an Anglo-Saxon trait. The national complaint of the Germans is Herzinsuffizienz and the French have the crise de foie, both conditions not easily translatable into Anglophone disease categories, though French medical writers often acknowledged a ...”

“... she gives us is a sort of sculpture in transition,’ Ernest Newman wrote – and may be more truly grouped with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse (Duncan and Duse were close friends, possibly lovers). Certainly modern dance, which arguably begins with Duncan and is like a torch in the night, passing from one woman to another, has sometimes ...”

“... Great Tradition – based on articles that first appeared in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make ...”