“... invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners ...”

“... Wilson, for instance – found it easier to do the trick than Hemingway himself. When he was young, he worked very hard at never saying anything the way anybody else would say it, and his success was remarkable. Later he often managed to do it again, when the ghost didn’t seize the pen and make him sound like one of his own imitators. Part of the ...”

“... along the street to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, passing on the way a covey of priests and earnest young laity en route for a pro-life demonstration. I feel sorry for these devout and less than butch youths (me, once), knowing the priests look down on them, while longing for sterner converts.At first the palazzo seems closed and we have to circumambulate the ...”

“... of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest going to a second round. At that point her cabinet collectively turned against her and let her know that she needed to step down for their sake. They couched it as a plea to save the party from ...”

“... The most riveting moment in Bermant’s book records an exchange between Argov and Sir Michael Palliser, who was permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office when Thatcher became prime minister. Argov told Palliser that Israelis saw Carrington (and maybe Palliser himself) as characteristic of the old English elite, whose disdain for the Jewish ...”

“... was made up of O’Connell and Parnell, and there was much emphasis on their time at Westminster. Young Ireland, the Fenians, even the poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there ...”

“... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...”

“... and barely 25 million South Koreans, which adds up to a lot more people. As Dean Spears and Michael Geruso write in After the Spike, ‘in the short run of one generation or less, the global population is a very big ship, slow to turn.’ Much of what will happen is already determined, so that even dramatically declining birth rates in some places will ...”

“... from analogue special effects, and it was fun to see him using it to address significant absences. Michael J. Anderson, the Little Man from Another Place, refused to appear after a quarrel about his fee, so his character was replaced by a screeching shrub. The character played by David Bowie, who died before he could shoot his scenes, now lived in a sort of ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... in a road accident; when he married again and acquired a stepson of whom he grew very fond, that young man joined the RAF in the Second World War and was killed in full view of his parents. He had told them that to celebrate gaining his pilot’s wings he would fly his Hurricane over their home. As he turned away it crashed into the hillside across the ...”

“... a touch of blouson at the shoulder – seemed to proclaim their dumb servitude to the bejewelled young Directors who were even now filing into the West Stand. And just look at the West Stand – those glass-faced boxes in which, thanks to an urgent application to the local magistrates, ‘business parties’ could escape the Government’s post-Brussels ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... kidnappers’ leaders. Another, one of two girls, has a gift for languages, and meets Hosokawa’s young polyglot translator in the china cupboard for romantic midnight reading lessons. If this all sounds too cosily implausible, it is, but to give Patchett the benefit of the doubt for a moment, perhaps it’s meant to be: she obviously didn’t set out to ...”

“... by Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour, edited by Michael D. Carroll (Carpet Bombing Culture, £19.95) – is a marker of our level of estrangement. Take Marina Amaral’s brilliant rendering of a photograph of one of Ulysses S. Grant’s councils of war in 1864, the Union command seated on pews carried out into ...”