“... of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.* (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous ...”

“... The word​  cunt was invented by the Norwegians. At first the OED wouldn’t have it in its pages and even today the dictionary describes it as the most taboo word in English. Norsemen said kunta and the Danes said kunte, as did ninth-century Germans, though not, seemingly, in anger or spite. Apparently, the first known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane ...”

“... liars’ and ‘cheats’. In front of him, a thin line of people, all in suits, stood waiting to be admitted to ‘NatCon’. I put my head down and joined the back of the queue. NatCon began in the United States in the dog days of the Trump presidency, ostensibly as a space for the authoritarian-curious on the American right to plot a new course based on ...”

“... The publisher’s launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in tableaux more impressive for their size than their quality, the appropriate Old Testament scenes ...”

“... of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices ... should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ...”

“... Younger Scottish writers seem to be preoccupied by gender. It is a theme crucial equally to Duncan McLean’s novel Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts ...”

“... then stand-alone Liberal Party more votes (over six million) than Paddy Ashdown achieved for the by now merged Liberal Democrats (five and a quarter million) at the last general election. Discretion, if not sheer political cowardice, decreed that his faintly saturnine presence should be air-brushed out of any contemporary ...”

“... The refutation of utilitarianism, and its replacement by some new and comprehensive alternative, has become one of the major Anglo-American growth industries. The problem of how to live with a liberal and mildly interventionist state if we no longer accept the premisses upon which such a state was originally founded has rightly exercised philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, though it is striking how difficult it has proved for them fully to disentangle themselves from the old ways of thinking ...”

“... of the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors deal, not with the global issues envisaged by Pugin but with the careers of famous (and, in one case, not-so-famous) architects. The history of architecture, we are asked to believe, is the history of the individuals whose names appeared on architectural drawings. The justification for this biographical ...”

“... adroitly restricted to an account of four visits. The first two, at intervals of a year, are paid by Daniel Francoeur, an American writer long resident in London, to his aging parents in Rhode Island. He finds them unhappy, constrained by repressed hostility and old disappointments. His mother, now an invalid who confines ...”

“... no worse than the old-fashioned Catholic Right: perhaps better, if the fate of Garcia Lorca be considered, for he was safe when being looked after in the house of fascists, and betrayed to his death by a Catholic ex-deputy. The Republic certainly did retain the services of men of integrity, to the end, but the shadow ...”

“... just go on parading their mutual distrust until it has become a way of life, and neither side will be satisfied until it has provoked a world explosion. I humbly think this is a mistake, but there is no limit to the extent of human folly. As to Hungary, it had an obscurantist regime in the days of Regent Horthy and it was a great stroke for Hungary when the ...”

“... process, the first portrayer of society in terms that Adam Smith might and Karl Marx did approve. David Brown makes the academic case admirably. He begins by modestly disclaiming originality: he is developing insights put forward by others in recent years, and only applying them more ...”

“... This book, by a man who at 35 was already called ‘a legend in American journalism’, is a lengthy and anecdotal analysis of the transactions between political power in the United States during the last fifty years and the power of the mass media. The latter are exemplified for Halberstam by four conglomerates of the American communications industry, each more or less in the control of a single family: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), created and run by William Paley; Time Inc, including Life, owned by Henry Luce; the Washington Post and Newsweek, run by Philip and then by Kay Graham; and the Chandler family’s Los Angeles Times ...”

“... The earliest examples come from southern Mesopotamia, and date to the end of the fourth millennium BC. They were used to record economic transactions, and there remained a distinctly mercantile quality to Mesopotamian civilisation throughout its history. Egypt soon followed, with similar ideas but with differing emphasis, since Egyptian writing seems to have ...”