“... the ground. ‘The world is now split into two camps. It has become clear that there can never be peace with the USA.’ ‘The Jews are a bunch of murderers and criminals.’ The hijackers were ‘brave men. They were mujahideen. You might call them cowards but none of you would be willing to sacrifice your lives.’ ‘Jihad is spreading like ...”

“... establish that in perpetuity, were confirmed by the point on which Barak was most adamant at Camp David in 2000: the absolute and irrevocable finality of whatever was agreed. There are frightening continuities between Israel’s unilateralism in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories. Some of them are pointed up in Jean Said Makdisi’s extraordinary war ...”

“... on the mainland, and also unwilling to compete with other writers. His English biographer David Gilmour suspects that he was moved to write by his sense that as an ‘ultimate descendant of an ancient noble line whose economic and physical extinction culminated in himself’, he would be the last member of his family to have ‘vital memories’, or ...”

“... controls, withdrawal from the EEC and import controls. Much of this wasn’t new. The historian David Edgerton has described the AES as a ‘modernising, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community ...”

“... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...”

“... to act until the next full parliament met and to exercise the powers of making war and peace and of appointing office-holders. For other matters the king would be permitted his own council, but parliament, not the king, would appoint its members. The office of Constable, suppressed in 1521, would be revived, ‘to counterpoise the authority of the ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... interest of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked to our ally, Ethiopia.’ In just over a decade, Eritrea had moved from Italian to British and then to Ethiopian rule, though the latter was an undeclared reality: the technical description of what had ...”

“... normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of decades, the ...”

“... for it.’ This from the author of The Logic of Political Economy, an exposition of the ideas of David Ricardo, which John Stuart Mill, for one, thought ‘very successful’. He wouldn’t have needed to owe rent on multiple rooms and houses, had it not been that the landlords held his drafts and papers hostage as collateral for his debts. Things improved ...”

“... in the domain of counterterrorism and his unbounded contribution to realise world security and peace’. On the night of 20 June, the eve of the Eid al-Fitr festival that ends the holy month of Ramadan, MBN was summoned along with other senior princes for an audience with the king. Shortly before midnight courtiers answering to MBS – who was already ...”

“... onto something that has paucity at the heart of it,’ Saunders says in a conversation with David Sedaris included at the end of Tenth of December.Why is his work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point, the source of ...”

“... Ghanaians, Communist Party etc.’ There wasn’t much truth in these claims. ‘At its height,’ David Gibbs writes in The Political Economy of Third World Intervention (1991), ‘the communist intervention in the Congo comprised no more than 380 Soviets and Czechoslovaks – against 14,000 UN troops and many thousands of Belgian military ...”

“... to mislead these people: what was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela … or Bill Clinton.’The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the ...”

“... may be expressed more succinctly by comparing James and Forster on Tolstoy. To Forster War and Peace was the greatest of all novels; to James it was, notoriously, a disaster: ‘what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?’ And yet Forster, so firm in dismissing James on the ...”