“... On 20 May, in a stuffy hall inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, behind the seven lines of sandbagged checkpoints, razor wire and sniffer dogs that protect it from the streets beyond, a new Iraqi cabinet was voted into office. Five months after they elected their parliament, Iraqis finally had a new government. This government included a minister for tourism but, despite the war raging across the country, no minister of the interior or of defence: Shia and Sunni leaders were still arguing over who should control those jobs ...”

“... Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering France’s quota of Jews for deportation. The name was familiar. Between 1963 and 1970, she had been treated three times a week by a psychoanalyst named ...”

“... to the agents of the state to search the premises of anyone at all on whom their suspicions ‘may chance to fall’: the new all-premises warrants are general warrants in a rather different sense. They specify the suspects, but not the premises, and they permit multiple searches of those unspecified premises. They seem intended to permit fishing ...”

“... because they happen to annoy him: ‘Strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.’ God seems to have forgiven the Hebrews again so he obliges Samson and ‘the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’ An unintended national liberation on ...”

“... Cretan Muslims were packed off to Turkish ports in whose back streets the Cretan dialect may still be heard today. Turkish-speaking Christians settled in Greece, with the result that the demand for Turkish-language music and films boomed, remaining strong in Athens and Thessaloniki well into the 1950s. The Muslims of western Thrace were exempted ...”

“... John McGahern is an extraordinary writer of charm and violence. His most recent novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), has a looseness and a gaiety which it took him nearly seventy years to allow himself. His earlier work marked him as one of the great writers of claustrophobia. His novels tend to evoke small places – single houses or tiny communities – and to crush into those places a set of family and moral ties that make them feel even smaller and tighter ...”

“... employed by scientific journals. The case for restricting an industrial pollutant, for example, may be substantial, and urgent for public health, and at the same time incomplete. The Data Quality Act and its peer-review provisions, Mooney points out, ‘simply give industry groups, which already have a right to challenge final regulations in court, multiple ...”

“... of fashionable sensibility perhaps; of some of the less palatable elements in her background she may have been unaware. She may never have known that her 16-year-old ‘cousin’ Joseph, who appeared in the Kauffman family in 1750, travelled with them for some time and then drifted away again to pursue a much less ...”

“... it is utopian. I mean only that it is a cluster of principles from which isolated departures may be inevitable even in a decent regime, but substantial and committed compliance with which is one key determinant of a regime’s decency. The most basic principle is this: when we live under the rule of law, the agents of the state are legally and publicly ...”

“... world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candour, and here I may be of some use. (‘October’) The last phrase is acutely self-aware, but this cannot justify its false modesty. If used automatically, irony can become archness: Come to me, said the world. This is not to say it spoke in exact sentences but that I ...”

“... Americans still supported Social Security, they still trusted the federal government. Reaganism may have brought the country back from post-Watergate malaise and disillusionment, but liberals would surely be back in power soon. In his new book, however, Reeves acknowledges that the Reagan era changed American political life seemingly for ever, by exalting ...”

“... that senses are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.) Nor am I clear what you’re supposed to do with a notion once a sense has been given it. There used to be a story according to which empirical inquiry works by first giving senses to notions, and then scouting around for something for the ...”

“... the temple courtyard. Though he comes from a line of priests, Willie’s father is not, as Maugham may have supposed, a man of spiritual depth, being more interested in the fame of the visitor after whom he named his son than in his religious investigations. Maugham’s title alludes to a metaphor from the Upanishads, comparing the way of enlightenment to the ...”

“... We should be even more cautious about an unwritten constitution, in which the meaning of a phrase may be more fluid because it lacks such a rigid context. It is futile to debate whether Victoria was more or less constitutional than George III, or whether Edward VII was the first really constitutional king, because no British monarch since 1688 has had power ...”

“... the garden should occupy some seventy acres, though he concedes that ‘some thing very princely may be contrived in thirty akers; allways supposing it be exquisitely kept.’ It will be surrounded by a wall of brick or stone, two feet wide and 13 feet high. There will be a huge staff of under-gardeners, masons, carpenters, labourers and odd-job men. In ...”