“... Israel decided to stop Gaza’s electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that ‘the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.’ Another thing the soldiers do is clearing – khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf ...”

“... and the so-called Jews of today. If Zionism preaches a glorious history going back to the days of David and Solomon, then that history must be a fiction cooked up centuries later for ideological purposes. If Zionism maintains that Jews longed to go home, then they must have been content to stay put. And if Zionists base their claim to the land of Israel on ...”

“... intensity in such media ‘events’ as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the David Duke campaign. Conspiracy theories detailed the infiltration of American higher education by ‘politically correct’ militants, and lamented the takeover of the art world by feminists, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. In short, for Americans who watch ...”

“... market will not permit some marginal adjustment on which he had staked ‘credibility’. This means, he advises his team, that they are all ‘Eisenhower Republicans’ now. Have a care, Mr President. Eisenhower was quite an activist chief executive. He built the interstate highway system and warned about the growth of the military-industrial complex. It ...”

“... has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow ...”

“... to wander, our batteries go dead, our hearing-aid ceases to function. I have to say what Professor David Minter is far too sensitive a critic not to know well, often hints but never says outright. Large regions of Faulkner’s novels are inaudible. In the racing sense as well as the literary sense let us have a glance at his form in that alleged masterpiece ...”

“... was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust.’ Her eyes widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’ On another occasion we discussed Simenon. I had mainly read the Maigret stories; she had mainly read the romans durs, which she greatly admired. I asked her to recommend one. She ...”

“... attention came when Goldsmith himself stood in the 1997 general election in Putney against David Mellor, the cabinet minister who had been caught having an affair with an actress. Her fuck-and-tell story ran in the tabloids and included the fictional detail that (to quote the front page of the Sun) ‘Mellor Made Love in Chelsea Strip’. In a ...”

“... page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’It was McGuinness who, in collaboration with David Pears, produced the second English translation, in 1961. But the correspondence with Ogden, in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little ...”

“... worth reading for a justification of his party that rises above ritual partisan point-scoring. If David Willetts was not already the best-known of the three when the books were commissioned, he certainly is now. Allegedly known as ‘Two Brains’ to his friends (or alleged friends, perhaps), Mr Willetts last year found himself in difficulties before a ...”

“... disguised symbolism (dogs, oysters, wine, pipes and so on), inculcating a system of values by means not altogether dissimilar from those used by the ‘history painting’ practised elsewhere in Europe. Moreover, the importance, even in the Netherlands, of such history painting has recently been brought to attention following a remarkable exhibition of ...”

“... the practice of law. The system we have is predicated on advocacy – that is, on presentation. David Pannick excavates Plato, Cicero and Quintilian for quotations about the deceptive and illusory characteristics of the art. But, as he would agree, the image of the advocate as conjuror is far too simple. In a process which is not single-mindedly devoted to ...”

“... bodies these values don’t fluctuate significantly. Crucially this ‘bio-passport’ system means that, for the anti-doping agencies, a clean sample is as useful as a dirty one, as it establishes the standard against which future fluctuations can be measured. Manipulating the results of individual samples, or hiding an athlete’s drug use by using ...”

“... next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it will be fought we don’t, in part because the present prime minister will not disclose when he intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities. Cameron ...”

“... was also a shift in the balance of power where the gas war was concerned. Few of the statistics David Stevenson gives in With Our Backs to the Wall, his book about the conduct of the war in 1918, are as striking as those involving poison gas. The Germans released 52,000 tons of gas on the Western Front, twice as much as the French and three and a half times ...”