“... to adopt a minimum ‘secular’ curriculum, and to deny support to extreme sectarian schools. It may not be accidental that this is happening at a time when the settlement ethos, like the place of religion in Israeli society, is being re-evaluated. A left-wing agronomist I know, playing devil’s advocate, argued that ‘Zionism was always about expansion ...”

“... US demanded that the Palestinians back this vision of their future. Sharon’s ‘peace’ plan may not deviate much from previous Zionist schemes, and yet it seems that things have got worse in Israel during the last few weeks. The assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Rantissi, with America’s support for Sharon’s plans in the background, are terrifying ...”

“... and his knockabout addenda include an index of ‘key words, phrases and concepts’ that ‘may be used as a substitute for reading the book itself’: Sansom makes the wry suggestion that this would be ‘no bad thing’. Some of these embellishments are borrowed from Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius features jaunty chapter ...”

“... problem with this argument is that it fails to take into account the possibility that an executive may invoke the state of exception, only then to defy the constitutional limits imposed on that state. Ackerman trusts the executive to bow to the constitution at the very moment it suspends it. More troubling than this contradiction are its consequences: the ...”

“... a lying memoir from prison, with advice to his publishers on how to promote it. He was hanged in May 1896. Has this lurid tale anything to do with the White City, or was it assumed that a book about the 1893 exhibition might not sell without some spicing up? Perhaps the latter. Yet the juxtaposition generates troubling thoughts and technical challenges. For ...”

“... cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies.’ Well, this may be true in the rest of the country, but not in Eskibahçe, where home-grown misbehaviour rarely lasts long. When Rustem Bey sentences his unfaithful wife to death by stoning, a few of the characters are briefly possessed by ‘the evil that emanates as if ...”

“... liberated constricted lives and fertilised leisure with pleasure. The Industrial Revolution may have transformed Merrie England into Coketown, but it also transported Coketown to Sleary’s Circus. It made people cheerful by making things cheap, administering a sacrament of culture, kitsch and candyfloss. It’s always been a part of the apology for the ...”

“... wigs in civil but not in criminal cases. If the Bar, again, does not reciprocate, someone may have to get firm with it. The alternative is the Republic’s easygoing process of elective abandonment. Whether retaining wigs in criminal cases will help to anonymise judges who come face to face in court with sometimes very violent people I am not sure. It ...”

“... those with properties outside London, who took private lodgings only for the ‘season’ between May and July and who might end up somewhere new every year. The owner-occupier was relatively rare, and the working classes and lower middle classes in particular might move in response to rising or falling income, to avoid bad neighbours, to be nearer other ...”

“... Carolus Linnaeus, who was born almost exactly three hundred years ago, on 23 May 1707, was the founder of modern systematics and taxonomy, the sciences of classifying and naming living things. Science has no holy books, but Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae comes close. Its tenth edition, published in Stockholm in 1758, was the starting point of zoological classification, and the binomial system for naming – one for the genus, e ...”

“... revelations turn up so often in his best novels that they start to hint nastily at a worldview: we may actually be plot-driven creatures, nothing but the utterances of a structure. This has been the built-in burden of Banks’s plots ever since his first novel. In The Wasp Factory (1984), 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame affably narrates a life spent on a remote ...”

“... of those earlier works. (Nor does it have the same translators as most of his other books, which may account for part of the difference.) It is the poet’s notebook: the record of the cities, men and things, the roads in unknown regions, the unexpected meetings and partings, that lie behind his earlier masterpieces set in Africa. And it contains only a very ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... falling snow, and white lilies are the fragrant flakes that drop onto the ground in the month of May. His metaphors unite antagonistic worlds by mean of an – often violent – leap. The First Solitude (he planned to write four but completed only the first and part of the second) tells the story of a pilgrim, unlucky in love and shipwrecked, who finds ...”

“... Maison du Pastel in the Marais, bought some Henri Roché crayons ‘from two ancient sisters who may have served Degas’ and determined to ‘draw better than any Jew who ever lived, as a riposte to my anti-Dreyfusard master’. Degas was one of his favourite antisemites, Kitaj wrote; the others were Pound and Eliot.Pastel, particularly the crumbly Roché ...”