“... the institutions of a state from the ground up in the Occupied Territories. Success in this may generate the momentum that will eventually carry them forward to full statehood after the five-year interim period. Arab reactions to the accord have been rather mixed. Arafat got a polite but cool reception from the 19 foreign ministers of the Arab League ...”

“... novels, she assures us, ‘continue to inspire readers’, though it is hard to know who these may be. A further glance at the reference shelf shows that Mrs Leavis, in Fiction and the Reading Public, deigns to mention Ouida, Marie Corelli and Ethel M. Dell, but not Glyn. Two thick Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her ...”

“... and France, against Egypt, now the standard bearer of radical Arab nationalism. The period 1949-56 may be seen simply as an interval between the first and second rounds. But it was a critical phase in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a period of increasing hostility leading to violence and then to full-scale war which set the pattern for decades to ...”

“... of Laing’s theory and his own life’s progress, my reasoning on the basis of what I read may not have been too far off the mark. It may even have been that Ronnie Laing, romancer of madness, suffered from the same problem as me. According to Charles Rycroft, who was his training analyst, he had ‘an extremely ...”

“... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...”

“... the privilege.’ This untraceable observation of Trotsky’s was widely credited, even if it may have originated with Macdonald himself. Again, one finds the permanent clown and misfit peeping out from behind the staunch campaigner. Reconsidering Macdonald’s contributions to Partisan Review and to his own small mag Politics (clue to the italic hommage ...”

“... in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials – ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home – it is also true that the dead don’t care. In this way, the dead I bury and ...”

“... months before. His was the classic ardour of the neophyte. It’s not out of the question that he may have been sincere. As André Gide once said, faith isn’t always the right faith. After 1944-5, Mitterrand even went in for left-wing ideas, while being quite ready to give them up again temporarily a few months later, when the opportunity came to get ...”

“... shall recall this much later in the novel, for the hermit is not what he seems ... He is, as you may have guessed, the great Sheikh of the Gomelez himself, who hopes to have found in Alphonse the mahdi who will lead an Islamic world conquest. Through the hermit, Alphonse is introduced to Pedro de Uzeda, a cabbalist, and invited to his castle. Here there is ...”

“... for middle-class voters and collective provision for the poor. The lesson of the United States may be that flourishing markets and broad prosperity for large sectors of society are compatible with quite high levels of urban ruin, poverty and racial conflict in carefully demarcated ‘combat zones’. Markets, it seems, are not quite the fragile ecosystems ...”

“... capitalism’, which nobody predicted and through which we are now living, or existing, may not last long. The division of the world economy into classes is a fact that is only ignored because it is so frighteningly obvious. ‘Anti-fascist’ may well cease to be a term of honour bestowed on past warriors, and ...”

“... until becoming ill with cancer, one symptom of which is that he is prone to delusions – which may make him an even more proficient fictionaliser than is his counterpart the professional writer. Lured to Israel by the apparition of Roth II, Roth I becomes embroiled in a plot which eventually involves him committing himself to work as an undercover agent ...”

“... true that he has found himself in this position by a mixture of chance and opportunism. The same may apply to much of the contemporary Russian political establishment, but he, more than most, has exploited a difficult situation with great skill and ruthlessness. It is now clear that the challenge he mounted to the Presidency, and the counter-challenge ...”

“... is metaphorically abstemious; his lines are poised, denotative, built on careful nouns. What may seem to be metaphors – Their words are soot. They tattoo the cosmos – turn out to figure accepted connections between things. Metaphor is hardly necessary, because the busy parts of Tikigaq’s world already have a far closer relation to each other than ...”

“... Tangier in 1954. ‘You were given the power to love in order to use it, no matter what pain it may cause you. Buddhism frequently amounts to a form of psychic junk ... I may add that I have seen nothing from those California Vedantists but a lot of horse shit, and I denounce them without cavil, as a pack of pathetic ...”