“... juxtaposed with a sailing boat as a roaring locomotive is to a stagecoach. Progress. The Titanic may not have been as technically innovative as Brunel’s Great Western, the first transatlantic steamer, had been in 1838: her two state of the art engines generated what was then an astonishing 750 horsepower. Titanic’s two more conventional engines each ...”

“... its brutal, racist police force, he had seen ‘nothing racial about my hurt, unbelievable as this may seem’. Like most black writers of his generation, Himes fell into the orbit of the Communist Party because of its commitment to racial equality. He hung out with Dalton Trumbo and black veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, wrote articles for the ...”

“... but I hope it will help me avoid further mistakes. What worries me most about what I did is that I may have ruined my student’s experience of reading a glowing report which, even as it referred to them, didn’t really refer to them. What does it feel like to read praise that is supposed to be about you but, in the very words it uses for you, reveals that it ...”

“... Like much else in Nepal, this would not appear in the newspapers. The bloody stalemate in Nepal may last for a long time. The army is too small and poorly equipped at present decisively to defeat the Maoists. In some areas it has recently tried arming upper-caste villagers and inciting them to take action against the Maoists. In the southern district of ...”

“... Legend decisively discredits that narrative with abundant evidence and convincing argument. This may come as a surprise to anyone who knows Boot’s ideological inclinations. For several decades he has been a laureate of American empire, openly echoing Kipling as he urges his countrymen to take up the white man’s burden by fighting ‘the savage wars of ...”

“... the Midwest. In June, Harry would arrive in his chauffeur-driven Lincoln to collect his sons. ‘May you come home in your coffin,’ Rose called after them. Harry showered the boys with gifts; they dined in the best restaurants and watched baseball at Wrigley Field, where he had a private box. In 1929, Schwartz’s father gave him a Chrysler Imperial. The ...”

“... attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in ...”

“... He sees himself as Castro’s paraclete, whereas he is only the devil’s advocate. Be that as it may, Cuba under Batista proved perhaps not too congenial but it certainly was more fruitful to him than under Castro. He hasn’t yet written Our Man in Havana (Part Two) and he had censorship problems when shooting the movie in Havana early in 1959. I arranged ...”

“... when we arrived. ‘Here,’ he said and tore out a paragraph from an inside page. ‘This may interest you.’ A man accused of child murders, held on remand, had written to the governor of the state of Bahia and to the President of Brazil demanding a trial to prove his innocence. ‘But this happened years ago,’ I said. ‘What’s so special about ...”

“... closed.’ The mother is, in fact, a collection of stereotypes out of central Irish casting. Moore may very well have had his eyes closed when he imagined her. His sense of Irish character and Irish speech becomes weaker and weaker, culminating in Lies of Silence (1990), a novel set in a contemporary Belfast which has as much truth and local flavour as a CNN ...”

“... an uncomfortable argument. And yet, to have History (from 1973) rather than Notebook (from 1970) may be editorially correct, but it is the wrong choice. I treasure my battered copy of Notebook, with its sticker ‘5 fl. dump special’ – I bought it in Amsterdam some time in the 1980s. I should have bought half a dozen of them, shoaled like Gong albums or ...”

“... won nothing, and are now staring at relegation and possible bankruptcy. If they survive, Leeds may have to go as long as the Red Sox, or longer, before they recapture their glory years, because the gravy train has now left without them. But that is the point. The transparency of what has happened to Leeds United – handing an advantage to their ...”

“... understanding of what politics was all about,’ one of his antagonists recalled. This may be the temperamental source of Zbig’s later enthusiasm for covert operations. The most important part of Brzezinski’s McGill experience was the master’s thesis he produced there. In it, he unveiled his core prophetic idea, that ‘neither Lenin nor ...”

“... by polls showing Dilma’s popularity had fallen to single figures, moved to impeach her. On May Day, she was unable even to give the traditional televised address to the nation: when her speech on International Women’s Day in March had been broadcast people banged saucepans and blew car horns, a form of protest that became known as ...”

“... does not necessarily mean that 135,000 are actually working.’ I heard that as many as 50,000 may be ‘ghost soldiers’ – invented names whose pay is collected by officers or bureaucrats. I heard Staff Sergeant Craig Patrick, who was training Iraqi troops, say: ‘It’s all about perception, to convince the American public that everything is going as ...”