“... Victoria cinema. On a visit to Cramond, on the city’s outskirts, he had noticed on the terribly white wall of the public lavatory a lone graffito: ‘Is there nobody queer in Cramond?’ Karl wanted out.It was at Cambridge that I first met him. We were both born in Edinburgh, but his background was working-class and mine was not. That seemed not to ...”

“... ideas from his communist and left-wing rivals: clean-up campaigns, anti-corruption purges and the white short-sleeved uniforms that were meant to convey the PAP’s purity. Meanwhile, his ‘Asian Values’ campaign and his 1980s eugenics programme – one of the few initiatives his citizens rejected – owe debts to Japanese fascism, and the PAP’s ...”

“... vans. At that time, remembering pictures of jolly Wehrmacht soldiers wrenching down the red and white Polish border gates, I felt quite protective about frontiers. But then I read a Polish novel. An allegory contrived to lull the censor, it described a tiny sliver of land between Belgium and Germany which had been overlooked by the surveyors as they drew ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties ...”

“... force a President from office and which has pushed candidates out of the present campaign for the White House. That kind of press arouses resentment: hardly a surprise. ‘The press is the enemy,’ President Nixon instructed his staff. Politicians less prickly than he have felt victimised by the press. And resentment does not come only from the ...”

“... in his youth. The partnership has inspired plays and novels, from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee. Its apotheosis, in this picaresque sense, is the notorious occasion at Trebon Castle in southern Bohemia, when the spirits revealed to Kelley their wish that he and Dee should ‘hold their wives in common’. That Jane Dee ...”

“... impossibly beautiful in a range of outfits, including a chest-hugging dark sundress and a clinging white one-piece swimming costume. Her character’s beauty is central to the plot because in the flashback sequences we learn that Sebastian is using her as bait to seduce young men. The script alludes to Catherine’s swimming costume becoming transparent in the ...”

“... the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on ...”

“... speech to excoriate Kinnock for his pusillanimity. A future Labour government had waved the white flag before it had even arrived in office: ‘Exposed to the threat of nuclear blackmail,’ she told the conference, ‘there would be no option but surrender.’ She contrasted the weakness of Kinnock’s position with that of more robust Labour ...”

“... has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A ...”

“... human life could find rebirth and transformation, 2001 was a natural successor to the black and white projection of the way this world would end. Dr Strangelove was still showing in second-run theatres soon after I learned about the effects just one hydrogen bomb would have, but what struck me then was not the political warning so much as the strange ...”

“... so much so that R. doesn’t even see the queen, though she’s distinctive enough, dressed in white and glittering with jewels, determinedly animated and smiling, which, since she’s been at it for two hours already, is an achievement in itself. We go on through the rooms, talking to all sorts of people – Jim Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who ...”

“... or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail white calves beneath billowing Bermuda shorts: not, at that era, a part of the expected scene on Nassau Street in Princeton. It was Artur Sergeevich, now removed from New York to live on Linden Lane, in the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques ...”