“... Earl of Hillsborough, to whom he dedicated his devastating satire, Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773). Satire was Franklin’s favourite way of delivering bad news to pompous officials. He had earlier proposed that, in exchange for British convicts being sent to America, the Colonial Governments should ship rattlesnakes back ...”

“... Fergusson’s poetry: ‘the niest dead-deal’ – the nearest board for lifting a corpse – ‘may be ours.’ Fergusson didn’t just write about city life: ‘The Farmer’s Ingle’ is more anthologised than ‘Auld Reekie’. But the natural world is rarely seen as unsullied. In the magnificent ‘Ode to the Gowdspink’, the goldfinch, a bird symbolic ...”

“... summer 2003. Almost half of them died, and 19 women died in childbirth at checkpoints. Such scenes may now be avoided, but even under optimal circumstances – and it remains to be seen how comprehensive the withdrawal will actually be – there are vast obstacles facing the Palestinians. The most recent World Bank assessment of the Palestinian economy, for ...”

“... it is not obvious that Meyer did ‘know’ the facts as Scull presents them. Indeed, the problem may be the obverse: that Meyer was unable, along with most others of his profession and generation, to perceive with sufficient moral clarity what was really going on. What comes through most strongly when one delves into this murky period is just how difficult ...”

“... where he works – or Tim O’Brien’s compelling Vietnam fragments, The Things They Carried. It may seem unfair to compare a first-time author unfavourably with various well-established names, but it’s also a backhanded compliment. There’s a thin line between being derivative and feeling your way with the help of like-minded precursors; just as it’s ...”

“... the skull of a man who has just been shot is compared to an ashtray on a café table. There may be a rather tiresome tendency to signpost impending plot revelations (Pankratov ‘seemed to possess some mighty secret’), and to favour telling over showing: ‘I knew immediately he was in love with her and that she knew it and despised every measure of ...”

“... anonymous, he must be W.K.-L. Dickson, the pioneering filmmaker – Foden’s failure to name him may have something to do with the fact that he has an intimately described homosexual relationship with a soldier. To these men, and a subsidiary cast that includes ‘real’ people like General Sir George White, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, General Buller and ...”

“... Early in May I fly from Lagos to Abuja as part of a group of foreign journalists travelling to interview President Obasanjo, who has just announced that he intends to stand for re-election. Abuja, home to Nigeria’s political elite, was conceived just over a quarter of a century ago. A settlement of big hotels and uncompleted construction projects, it has little of Lagos’s eventfulness ...”

“... Last May Stephen Greenblatt, who was then president of the Modern Languages Association, the literary academic’s equivalent of the Teamsters, circulated a letter among its twenty thousand or so members. ‘Over the last few decades,’ he wrote, ‘most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length book published by a reputable press ...”

“... kind of nationalist academic apartheid is being constructed. In the future, students from England may well be less inclined to enter Scottish universities out of exasperation at having to pay fees from which Scots are exempt. Conversely, many Scots are likely to be put off from studying south of the border by the prospect of heavy fees there. Yet it would ...”

“... an innate responsiveness to the feelings and needs of others. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ Smith wrote in the opening lines of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from ...”

“... creation of the hospital state’ à la Foucault – before gradually accepting that it may in fact be a creation of nature and ‘random bad luck’. As Dominique moves towards integration and prevention, William heads for the wilder shores of identity politics, denouncing his former lover as a collaborator for going ‘whining’ to the state for ...”

“... likenesses of living persons – began to appear in China about 2500 years ago. The tradition may be long, but the breadth and scale of the genre are even more striking, especially when portraiture is asked to perform broader duties than the depiction of people. The portrait of a continent is not the same as the portrait of a lady, say, and neither is a ...”

“... and fugue by Bach, and groaning like Glenn Gould. She tells him their father has had a stroke, may not live long, and Bobby should go and see him. We perceive the story of estrangement instantly, because it’s the basic relation of father and son in all American stories of this kind. Maybe Dupea will go up to Washington State, maybe he won’t. But he ...”

“... rhetorical device which dismisses a strong counter-opinion as a ‘tedious riposte’ – what may be termed the ‘that old chestnut’ gambit. There seems no place for a candid friend of Israel in this account of a long history when a territorial state of Israel did not exist, followed by a very different period when it has existed. Recently, as I dealt ...”