“... and depressions which were exacerbated by unsatisfactory love affairs, saddened them. There may even be a little guilt in it. Every time and place has its characteristic luxuries. In Minton’s Soho they were champagne and taxis. Minton was always better off than most of his friends, and sometimes very much richer (the money came from department ...”

“... a case which had been described as ideal for the purpose, with Iraq so dependent on imports. One may suspect that the most powerful motive for this was impatience, but there was another much more respectable one: concern for the Kuwaitis, who were being subjected to a senselessly cruel regime of looting, pillaging, torture and murder. A vivid account of life ...”

“... nothing irreversible about buildings,’ I say: ‘isn’t it possible that one day Ariel may be a Palestinian city, with Palestinians living in your houses, using your factories and enjoying your swimming-pools?’ Mayor Ron Nachman simply smiles and shakes my hand. For a man so utterly convinced of his own rectitude such a question does not merit ...”

“... has its moments of Fauréesque harmonic sweetness. At the same time, Fauré’s boldest gestures may equally well be felt to refer backwards as well as forwards. Of the last, and ‘with the Sixth, incontestably the most moving and inspired’, of the series of 13 Nocturnes, Nectoux observes: ‘The chromatic counterpoint and the dissonances caused by ...”

“... out there, something free of the law, free of any comforting faith in a God whose motives may be explained through our own, something that has become the map of my heart.’ The dangers in dealing with this kind of material are self-evident: the world certainly doesn’t need an Australian Dances with Wolves (Dances with Dingoes, maybe?). But Hall ...”

“... of both Ruskin and Brown, but Brown was his first and most enduring hero and mentor. This may have chilled the air between the two older men. They approved of the same people, but they could never bear each other. For Brown, the enmity was unlucky. In the 1850s Ruskin’s public applause was useful to a painter who needed to sell, and Ruskin would ...”

“... and more lastingly than anyone else ... And he has my vote. That is what counts. Radical rejection may be forceful, but it is not interesting. Criticism proves worthwhile only when brought to bear against a group, a doctrine, a personality that one basically affirms, against mistakes that can be corrected – as later happened in the schools founded by ...”

“... life in the Soviet Union in recent years would be well advised to read Laqueur. The British reader may not know it, but Arkadi Vaksberg is one of the most popular people in the Soviet Union – a brilliant lawyer and writer. Before glasnost, be was the nearest thing to what might he called an investigative journalist, describing cases of scandalous injustice ...”

“... the Prophet Mohammad: ‘Wish death and welcome after-life.’ The liberation of Khorramshahr in May 1982 did not bring with it repopulation. The city was used as a springboard for an Iranian offensive across the Shatt al Arab river – a strategy which cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produced nothing but prolonged and pointless stalemate. The ...”

“... that experience, and the friendships I formed with people who were there – I treasure it all. We may never see each other again; too many of the people who were there are gone. We live in dangerous times, and I’m concerned about the future. The Holocaust could happen again – I see the seeds of it.’ Ted Ferstermacher, a prosecutor, told me: ‘Nuremberg ...”

“... on the bugler boy’s first communion he noted: ‘I am half inclined to hope that the Hero of it may be killed in Afghanistan.’ It would save him from sexual corruption. But how to be pure without being ‘time’s eunuch’? Hopkins had himself circumcised, a symbolic castration, and in his poetry – the Eurydice, the Deutschland, the charming unfinished ...”

“... society. The readings in factories, which the Government probably grew progressively less keen on, may now sound chi-chi, but she was not ‘alienated’ and ‘marginalised’, as she felt Western writers were. Goethe’s ‘creativity without society’ she glosses impulsively: ‘what a horrible thought!’ You could say that her need for the GDR to exist ...”

“... as they are, depend on the workings of the thriller or mystery story, something that Enzensberger may have spotted when he spoke of an ‘English’ view of the Continent. Many Englishmen, in that last period of authority and empire, were conditioned to see life as an adventure story, with themselves in a casually dominant role. For all Hughes’s throwaway ...”

“... caution that ‘this relatively low rate’ – it seems to me a staggeringly low rate – ‘may not have implied chastity or strict moral codes among the young’; but it is hard to see quite what else it could imply, given the absence of most known modes of contraception. What these statistics strongly and surprisingly suggest is that the sexual ...”

“... information about Feynman, much of it presented in the master’s own voice. For physicists, this may be the preferred biography. In the end, Feynman’s life story, wonderfully crazy, is immune to any number of blunders on the part of a potential biographer. Feynman seemed to be in direct, intuitive contact with the fundamental realities of the universe. A ...”