“... beard he carries a secret torch for, Rasa has been colonised. He retreats to the library, reads Edward Said and Partha Chatterjee, Gramsci and Marx, assembling from a scaffold of ideas a postcolonial self, stylishly accessorised with a checked kaffiyeh. Throughout Guapa, Haddad is more intent on giving Rasa a vivid, interrogative and comically ...”

“... view suggests. Its architect, the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, was nearer the mark when he said that two thousand interviews had gone to its making. The Zionists had long brushed aside the presence of a predominantly Arab population in Palestine, and they now managed to make the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary do the same. In one ...”

“... twenty years after the events in which he played such a prominent part: if the British people, he said, had been less absorbed in the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the energy thus saved might have been used to avert world war. Possibly the same remark might be made today, for popular, even best-selling, books and ...”

“... of a hundred thousand refugees: as members of the ‘tribe of the wandering feet’, he said, Jews should stand with Palestine’s refugees. The leading expert in the US on the Palestinian refugees, Don Peretz, was employed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). After the 1948 war, he worked with a Quaker group that distributed food and clothing to ...”

“... reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it ...”

“... killed by US and UK soldiers.’ Eliza Manningham-Buller, who resigned as head of MI5 in 2007, said: ‘Our involvement in Iraq has radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people.’ Before the 2003 war Iraq, under the authoritarian dictatorship of Saddam and his predecessor, had the highest level of education in the Middle ...”

“... been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his most significant. Three of these impressions can be recorded as a measure of our distance. First, that he is one of the more interesting and tolerable Marxist critics of literature, in the breadth of his learning and in his relative freedom from ...”

“... In Genesis 6 God said: ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.’ He was behaving like a certain kind of satirist, and an untutored reader might even suppose that a satirical author was speaking through Him. The Houyhnhnm Assembly in Gulliver’s Travels was similarly given to debating ‘Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth’ (a type of proposition Swift entertained in his own name from time to time), or whether they should merely be castrated, a more humanely gradualist project that would achieve the same result in a generation ...”

“... volumes of Beauvoir’s memoirs, those translated as The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, All Said and Done and Adieux: A farewell to Sartre. Crosscheck against the documentary scripts, the recorded conversations and these letters, not forgetting to decode the pseudonyms in Lettres au Castor – here the surname Kosakiewicz becomes ...”

“... plays of Shakespeare – ‘It’s all fighting and fucking tarts!’ – and the same might be said, with less enthusiasm, of Roth in extremis. These are not the kinds of thing one cares to say of a writer as richly talented as Roth, and not many, it seems, are willing to say them. Roth is one of those writers whom book reviewers, and even some ...”

“... show such insensitivity? The main reason, many scholars would argue, is Orientalism. When Edward Said elaborated his critique of Western scholarship about the ‘East’ in 1978, he focused on British and French Orientalists. Since the publication of Orientalism, however, a number of writers have applied his analysis to American culture and have ...”

“... state. ‘In order to maintain culture, and especially in order to maintain democracy,’ he said in a recent discussion with Amos Oz, ‘a certain type of illusion is needed,’ and in Israel today, the layer of culture has disintegrated ‘that makes possible the illusions that are needed to maintain a more or less tolerable fabric of life’. To ...”

“... novel, but in a letter-writer it can be the ultimate in boring. I was one of those who would have said Bellow couldn’t be boring, but seasoned loyalty knows not the correspondence. All his life, Bellow’s chief correspondents – the ones who drew letters in return – were his admirers. There are few lengthy exchanges here between him and people who ...”

“... of the major architects of the whole post-colonial enterprise in the West. Her fellow architect Edward Said has become increasingly impatient with what they have jointly succeeded in constructing, and in his attractively caustic manner is not averse to saying so; but Spivak is more eirenic than her occasionally embattled prose-style would suggest. Her ...”

“... voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked him’; and I believe them. Asked why he liked him so much across a fair breadth of the political spectrum, the Guardian’s Ian Aitken, no relation, last of the old man’s Green Park walkers, answers: ‘Because he was so ...”