“... to fabricate a first bomb,’ and eight or nine kilograms for subsequent ones. According to David Albright, one of the best and most reliable independent experts, ‘the most credible worst-case estimate’ is that the North may have between 6.3 and 8.5 kg of reprocessed plutonium. In other words, the CIA’s educated guess, endlessly repeated in the ...”

“... about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be avoided, or his survival ...”

“... no jurisdiction over what went on in military prisons. On 31 December 2011 another large rally was held in Tahrir Square. The Scaf seemed to have realised it needed to take a step back, because there were no military or other police in evidence and the atmosphere was relaxed; people brought their children with them, as I did. It was a massive New Year’s Eve ...”

“... her all on a bid to become a ‘Great Writer as Countercultural Hero’, a position no woman had held before her, and I’m not sure any has held since. She died before the internet properly got going, when becoming famous or celebrated or iconic was a completely different matter from what it is now. Photographs were ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”

“... But she brought her head up, wobbling, and she raised her arms, raised them and spread them and held them out. And then she staggered toward me, just as a car pulled into the yard.   ‘Guhguh-guhby ... kiss guhguh-guh –’   I brought an uppercut up from the floor. There was a sharp crack! and her whole body shot upward, and came down in a ...”

“... British justice was so rigid that when his term as governor ended in 1831, wild celebrations were held around Sydney Harbour as his ship sailed out between the heads. Malouf’s fictional Michael Adair, as an Irish officer (from the landed gentry, to be sure; but Irish nonetheless) in a British regiment, has of necessity internalised a received system of ...”

“... appropriate to pictorial meaning. It is an account that runs counter to a number of views widely held today of what it is for a picture to have meaning ... Another way of putting the account that I am against is to say that it assimilates the kind of meaning that pictures have to the kind of meaning that language has ... What kind of account of pictorial ...”

“... It is hard for a reader in the mid-20th century to grasp that Podsnappish views could have been held in an open-eyed spirit by intelligent men and women in the Victorian period. The 20th century has a way of foisting its own kind of view on those Victorians who are perceived as intelligent. Hence the extremely improbable speculation that in Middlemarch ...”

“... The stagnant waters are frightening, partly, for their irrationality. Not that the evil spell held us always motionless. Mysterious currents drifted us here and there, with a stealthy power made manifest by the changing vistas of the islands fringing the east shore of the Gulf. And there were winds too, fitful and deceitful. They raised hopes only to dash ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... repulsive”, these were the epithets which Trotsky threw at the man who had so recently held out to him the hand of friendship.’ Still, it didn’t ring true somehow. I did what I assumed Steiner must have done. I turned to the beginning of the chapter and read again up to page 93. Just a few pages earlier, I found the explanation. Deutscher ...”

“... most miss the random but well-informed conversations we used to have at the critics’ meetings held every so often in the board room at lunchtime. The hard work was planning the general shape of the pages in the month to come. The easier work was in general chatter, ably moderated by, in my time, Roger Alton and then Helen Oldfield. Does anyone know ...”

“... with the vasty deep. By 1404, English authority throughout Wales was in tatters. Glyn Dŵr held his first parliament in May and not only explored alliances with Scotland and Ireland, but sent diplomatic missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with ...”

“... the words of the statute say less than they appeared to. The minority, of which Sumption was one, held it couldn’t – or needn’t – be done. For the majority, Lord Carnwath applied the principle that an unlawful decision was no decision and so was unprotected by the exclusionary clause. But neither of these is what the case was really about. The ...”