“... population) in time of war. Since many ex-generals serve in the reserves, professional soldiers may often find themselves commanded by civilians. Despite the recent move to the right in Israel politics, moreover, the Army today enjoys nothing like the monolithic role it played in strategic planning during the formative years of the state. Since the Yom ...”

“... in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They thought they would ‘sort out’ the Afghans in a matter of a couple of months. Alas, Muscovites and Byelo-Russians can no more sort out the internecine complexities of Afghan tribal, family and personal history in a few weeks than English ...”

“... What Chirac wants and how he will achieve it no one knows, perhaps not even Chirac. Since May 1968, he has held politicians in low esteem, and he does not much like top professional civil servants either, many of them – like himself and his prime minister Alain Juppé – graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. And his programme is no ...”

“... influence good. He hardly recognises – strange in a historian of refugees – that isolation may be necessary and justified; and that it might lead to more important contributions either to scholarship or to public life than immediate acceptance. He seems oblivious to the fact that ‘influence’ does not stand outside history. His brief discussion of ...”

“... kind of battle with the Hollywood system. Given Ingrid Bergman’s own circumstances, she may have been thinking of his marital adventures. Soon after his father’s death in 1919, he married Catherine Hessling, one of Pierre-Auguste’s models. He began to make films as a showcase for her talents (or at least, ambitions) and their marriage broke down ...”

“... When the dopey President recognises his own situation as ‘just like Catch-22’, Heller may be (I hope) commenting not only on his own fame but on something like the taming of absurdity. ‘I can’t appoint a chief justice until I’m the President, and he can’t swear me in until I appoint him. Isn’t that a Catch-22?’ The person asked the ...”

“... words, quite literally provided lustre. The proposal is convincing about Memling’s career. It may be, as Israel proposes, that art history is, or should be, ‘essentially an adjunct of history itself’. But what sort of an account of paintings would be offered under such a regime? The pun on lustre – in painting and in the social world – speaks to ...”

“... beef market would fall.’ There’s a lesson floating around in One to Count Cadence, though it may be too late and too caustic for digestion so many years, illegal arms-deals and political scandals alter the Vietnam War. ‘You didn’t like killing those cats.’ says Private First-Class Joe Morning to his protagonist Sgt Krummel, ‘but something inside ...”

“... this is a book written under a peculiarly taxing constraint. To do without the letter e in English may be marginally more difficult than to do without it in French. Perec was denied the use of some invaluable linguistic forms: je, se, le, ce, elle, de, les, des, avec, après, quel, que, est: the list is potentially very long, and frightening. Written ...”

“... universally accepted by mankind.’ ‘Personality’, the narrator suggests in The Great Gatsby, may be ‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’. It’s a wrong-headed and self-punishing proposition. Both Gatsby and The Last Tycoon are novels which dream of such a personality, but they tell us finally, as Fitzgerald’s life does, that personality can ...”

“... write. He pretended to have a low regard for his thrillers, as simply his source of cash, and they may have seemed to him not merely unserious but also unmanly: one can’t imagine Sandy Arbuthnot with a novel in his top drawer. He liked his historical novels better, but if he was to be remembered as a writer, he wanted it to be for his biographies. And all ...”

“... one’s visible in the rain-soaked yard, though the hubcaps sparkle and clank in the breeze. She may be seeing something as a metaphor for something else.    Unexpectedly, though, she sits forward and lays a consolidating mitt on Joe’s bare, hairy shoulder, which causes him to jump like he’d been stabbed. Though he quickly detects this as a gesture ...”

“... and dilemmas. Further, the painting is closely related to Corneille’s tragedy Horace and may be said to be influenced, or indeed inspired, by the contemporary debate, which itself was partly political, over the relative merits of Corneille and Racine. ‘Racine makes lovers out of his syllables so that nothing can separate them,’ wrote a ...”

“... is an ultra bourgeois family, how many invalids in it, combien de malades dedans?’ We may not all come from bourgeois families, but we can all ask similar questions. How many secrets, how many corpses, old loves, old horrors? The narrator’s father takes his two sons for a walk and tells them what he thinks of as a ghastly piece of the family’s ...”

“... eight hours a day, read other poets voraciously, study their technique and relate it to my own. It may seem a bizarre career change, but to my mind it’s simply a matter of getting on a different bicycle and finishing the same ...”