“... Dáil. During the next two years, both the SDLP (publicly) and the Irish Government (privately) held meetings with the Republican leadership. Then, in November 1989, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Brooke, publicly admitted that it was ‘difficult to envisage the military defeat’ of a force such as the IRA ‘because of the ...”

“... known as the periphery doctrine, put in place in the 1950s by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the first heads of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. The strategy’s basic premise was that Israel faced a proximate ‘core’ of implacable Arab hostility, which could be countered only through action at its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bleach), the clip-on dark-glasses worn at all times, the cigarette in the corner of the mouth or held in the hand in such a way that the smoke would turn his fingers oak-brown, the felt hat, dark shirt and light tie, which gave him a gangsterish appearance, though more Guys and Dolls Runyonesque than High Sierra Bogartian. I knew, too, that he was queer (the ...”

“... betrayed him to the local sheriff in Oklahoma), and Stash disappeared altogether. Even the amiable David, a Californian draft dodger and pacifist who lounged about the flat in an Easy Rider fringed jacket and cowboy boots, came back some nights with bleeding knuckles from pub fights he swore he hadn’t started. A commune has a natural life, and ours was ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... teacher Leopold Kronecker reviled it as ‘humbug’ and ‘mathematical insanity’, whereas David Hilbert declared: ‘No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.’ Bertrand Russell recalled in his autobiography that he ‘falsely supposed’ all Cantor’s ‘arguments to be fallacious’, only later realising that ‘all ...”

“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

“... a few of the larger, rather unrepresentative towns, like Oxford and Cambridge. The Conservatives held on with intact majorities to places like Swindon, Reading and Milton Keynes, where Labour had hopes. Suburban England, where the Lib Dems had been serious competition for the Tories, is now overwhelmingly Conservative. The party also won seats in towns with ...”

“... of his family. After completing his degree he abandoned engineering to become an imam, and held posts at mosques in Denver, San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, where he was at the time of the attacks of 11 September 2001. He was by then becoming widely known for his preaching, circulated first on cassettes, then on CDs and ...”

“... and it seemed inevitable that they would be tortured. The two defence counsel, George Bizos and David Soggot, brought in Kentridge and an urgent application, based on the evidence elicited from the prosecution witnesses, was made for injunctions forbidding the police to ill-treat them. The judge refused to treat the application as urgent, with the result ...”

“... William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The organisation is of particular interest because of McGrath’s close links with the British Israelites ...”

“... States.’ His popularity in the country, especially among Labour people north of the Trent, held up remarkably throughout much political misfortune and extended into his retirement. This was something which metropolitan comment tended to ignore. Wilson was an incorrigibly provincial man with the common touch, and that, I think, chiefly accounts for his ...”

“... itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself. This book is a great feat. Andrew Boyle went through archives and memoirs in two continents, but above all persuaded people to talk – people in the know, who had given out little or no information before. So much has been written ...”

“... peoples are structured in analogy with their own social organisations. The social bond is held in place in the following way: people converse; to comprehend each other they need shared categories; as these categories are the reflection of the social order, their very conversation confirms the formal ordering of their society. Later Durkheim’s study ...”