“... hardly see the sky. The cafés have charming names that ‘read like a Levantine requiem’, as David Holden wrote of old Alexandrian phonebooks. From the terrace of the fish restaurant where I had lunch, I watched children playing on the beach; a few women were in bikinis, a rare sight in a city where more and more women wear full niqabs, including black ...”

“... received the honour of another ‘soft sovereignty’. The agreement brokered by Condoleezza Rice states that Palestinians and Egyptians will run their common border, but the entire process of crossing from Egypt to Gaza or Gaza to Egypt will be overseen by Israeli security. According to the agreement, an advanced CCTV system sends real-time pictures to ...”

“... and played, the housekeeper kept house. Meals consisted of ‘nursery food’; mince, herrings, rice pudding, apple pie, treacle tart or spotted dog. Relaxation came in the form of jigsaws, or games of Happy Families or draughts, games which Britten insisted were played properly and which he had to win. In everything he did, winning was important to ...”

“... to have been foreseen from the time of my birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish names, David and Bernard, but preceded them with Anthony. I was always called Tony. This perhaps went well with the sort of role my mother wanted me to play. When I was eight she said she would like me to have a career like Noël Coward’s; later she suggested that I ...”

“... situation, or the correlative of one, and its accompanying atmospheres. Surveying the flushed and rice-powdered faces of the ladies huddled in their billiard-room dormitory at the Residency, the Collector experiences a twinge of pleasure at his own ‘scientific’ perception that ‘being all together like this excites their femininity’. The conditions of ...”

“... leadership.’ In accounts of the space race, LBJ is the hawkish figure. Eighteen months later, at Rice University outside Houston, soon to become home to Nasa’s Mission Control, Kennedy spoke to the nation: ‘We choose to go to the moon,’ he said and said it again and again. In one long sentence he outlined what would have to be done: But if I were to ...”

“... at Oxford on his graduation. In 1912 he accepted the chair of biology at the recently founded Rice Institute in Houston but never settled, shuttling across the Atlantic. Four years later he returned to do war work in England and then in 1919 accepted a post in the zoology department at Oxford. Six years later, when he was 38, he became professor of ...”

“... on a book about the men and women they wouldn’t marry (‘no species rare’), and with Elmer Rice on a play, Close Harmony, which had a short run in 1924. She also published two collections of verse. Unusually for poetry, Enough Rope (1926) and Sunset Gun (1928), which have been reprinted in a new Everyman edition, were bestsellers. They were also ...”

“... Ali’s latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. David Bromwich Like the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, the rockets from Gaza were a choice of tactics of a spectacular vengefulness. The spectacle was greater than the damage: no Israeli had been killed by a rocket before the IDF launched their ...”

“... analysts and scientists believe they reflect. Since 2000, worldwide cereal harvests (wheat, maize, rice) have outstripped anything in the 1990s, yet between 2005 and 2008 prices soared: wheat and maize grown in the US rose by about 130 per cent; so did American soya, which goes mostly to animal feed. Dairy prices shot up (butter by 74 per cent, powdered milk ...”

“... success came with the general strike of 1953 – the Great Hartal – when a dramatic rise in rice prices caused by the Korean War momentarily turned the population against the government of Senanayake’s son, Dudley, who took refuge with his cabinet on a British battleship docked in Colombo harbour. But the LSSP and other Marxist parties failed to ...”

“... Sue Ann freaks on seeing Michael chewing an electric cord and screams: ‘You’ll fry like rice.’ But the drop-in friends are too busy with the Moroccan hash to respond.That’s the way Didion likes to tell a story – just the details you need to grasp what’s happening. It’s this restraint that illumines Slouching towards Bethlehem. ‘On ...”

“... In 1977, Beam received a grant from the state of Texas to build a simulated Vietnamese rice paddy in swampland near Houston: here, he trained recruits as young as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four years later a promising opportunity presented itself. A number of South Vietnamese refugees had been resettled on the other side of Galveston Bay, and ...”

“... the agents of American defeat. One, Abel Kavanaugh, facing a court martial, shot himself. Another, David Wesley Hoffman, had been one of the pows who volunteered to meet with Fonda. He hoped to remain in the military. He met with Pentagon officials on his release; then, on 13 April 1973, all three television networks covered a news conference in which he said ...”

“... I mistake it, witnessing in England the gradual disappearance of the old landed classes.’ As David Cannadine remarks in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, ‘five hundred years of patrician landownership had effectively been halted and reversed in seventy.’ True, if you draw up a list of the great property owners today, the same names ...”