“... refused to hire a first-rate mathematician just because she was a Tory, or a vocal critic of Israel. But much of what is under attack in the new Act, and the broader political onslaught on universities of which it is a part, is not the abuse of academic freedom, but academic freedom itself. My hypothetical example of a climate change sceptic applying for ...”

“... in modern fiction. In other respects, the novel is a disappointing performance. Jonathan Cape would apparently have us take Alice fell as a condition-of-England novel. Yet this national portentousness is refracted at the reader by fictional techniques which are distractingly mal à propos. Superficially, Alice fell is, in fact, scarcely a ...”

“... Alexandre Dumas in his novel Le Capitaine Paul, for example, and by Herman Melville, who wrote in Israel Potter about Jones’s capture of the British sloop-of-war HMS Drake:It was … such a scheme as only could have inspired a heart which held at nothing at all the prescribed prudence of war, and every obligation of peace – combining in one breast the ...”

“... Combining extraordinary erudition of detail – his later writing on China, India and ancient Israel is much more impressive than his relatively thin early sally on Protestantism – with a battery of novel theoretical concepts, the range and depth of Weber’s undertaking compose the greatest single monument of classical sociology. If we consider the ...”

“... echo of this imperfectly acknowledged transformation in the more avowedly Marxist work of Jonathan Dollimore. In his absorbing book Radical Tragedy Dollimore made free use of the term ‘essentialism’, meaning the ascription of a permanent, necessary form to reality. He wrote, in a way which still seems bizarre to me, as if Karl Popper had never ...”

“... to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled ...”

“... general growth of the historical profession between the early Sixties and the mid-Seventies (in Israel no less than in Western Europe and North America) has greatly boosted the production of monographs, dissertations and scholarly articles. ‘Holocaust Studies’ have entered the curriculum of North American schools and colleges, and in the United States ...”

“... forced to be that of the new – and not only for a few exiled intellos in Paris and London. As Jonathan Sperber has shown in The European Revolutions 1848-51,* the social and the national were intimately conjoined in the tragedy of 1848: ‘Ironically, it was the overthrow of the authoritarian pre-1848 regimes and the creation of a freer and more open ...”

“... Foucault or Robbe-Grillet, and he contrived to offend everyone when it came to such questions as Israel or Algeria. Asked for his position on the bourgeoisie, he responded: ‘Right inside it.’ He also affected the manner of a prewar Polish dandy, kissing women’s hands, wearing make-up and so on, and played the tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in ...”

“... between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the time. The second inspired ...”

“... radicalism, assertive oil independents, and an Arab oil embargo precipitated by US support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, that finally detonated the old system. In a ten-month period in 1974, the price of a barrel of oil rose 228 per cent. The OPEC revolution turned the oil-procurement system upside down. America was now obliged to fashion a new oil ...”

“... US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding ...”

“... as Roark (Rand was delighted: Cooper was famously right-wing) and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Jonathan Romney, reviewing a 1998 re-release, admired the ‘monumentalist oppressiveness’ of the art direction, then remarked on how strange it was to see the noble Gary Cooper professing not the usual love-of-the-little-fellow tosh, but the joys of the ...”

“... Frederick, which was overdrawn to the tune of nearly £6 million. In May 2021 a High Court judge, Jonathan Cohen, ordered Frederick to pay her £100 million – one of the largest divorce settlements ever awarded in the UK. By the summer of 2022, however, the deadline imposed by Cohen had passed, and Frederick still hadn’t paid Hiroko a penny. The ...”

“... to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organised crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too quick to shout ...”