“... brother’s apartment, twenty soldiers slept in his living-room. One of them was a paramedic who may have had doubts about the Army’s operation. He had earlier told my brother that he thought well of the Palestinians, but felt they were badly led. My brother had told him what he thought of the Israeli leadership. Before the officer left he told Samer: you ...”

“... the bar. (Bruno didn’t believe in heat.) Also, it would probably be raining out. You knew it was May or October because it was bright outside. But there was a period of only a week or so in high summer when the light came through the transom and puddled on the floor in a particular way. I’ll always remember that. I imagine it must be like that in certain ...”

“... of acute crisis, one can view the justices’ intervention more charitably. However much the Court may have hurt itself, did it not save the larger Constitutional structure from greater damage? Perhaps. But even pessimists should question the way the Court chose to intervene. The more democratic solution would have been not to stop the Florida courts from ...”

“... little time for preparation as possible. In the event he was arrested on a Saturday afternoon in May for trial the following Monday. In the Court of King’s Bench, the attorney-general read out the charge contained in the information. Hone asked for a copy of the charges against him, but was refused one unless he was willing to pay to have the information ...”

“... had started out by splitting rails – could rise to independence, success and wealth. Lincoln may have been peddling a myth, Sandage observes, but no nation ever came closer to realising it than the United States in the first half of the 19th century. Vast open lands (open, that is, once the natives had been pushed off) offered extraordinary opportunities ...”

“... Doping dissolves the vital connection between professional cyclists and ordinary pedallers. It may have taken us almost twice as long as the slowest rider in the Tour to climb L’Alpe d’Huez, but we negotiated the same 21 hairpins, felt the same tug of gravity on every bend and were cheered, with only the merest hint of sarcasm, by the same crowd. We ...”

“... display, that it is possible to inhabit a character completely different from one’s own.’ It may have been a distinctive feature of Redgrave’s career that he more and more found himself playing characters who were not very different from his own divided self. He was never simply one thing, and his famous parts – Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Leo in ...”

“... control over the Strip in a different form. It’s possible that with the Gaza plan Israel may, for the first time and with pressure from the international donor community, be able to secure Palestinian endorsement of what it is creating. In this respect, the Disengagement Plan can be seen as yet another in a long line of Israeli attempts to extract ...”

“... thing. Since that day, dead bodies and fashion have seemed to me specially linked, though that may be just a personal thought. Someone else might tell you that, suddenly back at their mother’s house for a funeral, they had snuck out to the pub, or gone running, or played some favourite music, loud. They might find an ex to have sudden sex with, as Nick ...”

“... picnic dishes and jewellery, and garden ornaments for people’s holiday homes. And then: ‘It may not sound like a cultural revolution, but that is what it turned out to be.’ This occurs on page 85. It will not be till page 394 that the reader will learn what the unlikely revolution really was. Various lesser theses follow in the meantime from these ...”

“... cannot put the book down. But sometimes you find yourself turning to a far less agile writer – a May or a Macartney on the Habsburgs, an Otto Pflanze on Bismarck – to understand the context, and to appreciate what Taylor achieved in simplifying it all. Taylor’s two books on the world wars are astonishing feats of clarity and compression. He himself ...”

“... pressure from the UN, since the ‘unique relationship’ policy outlined in a White House memo of May 1961 still applies: ‘Israel must know that if attacked, it can count on United States action inside and outside the United Nations.’ Biden is known to dislike Netanyahu, but at the height of the killings they were talking every other day. The Israeli ...”

“... however reactionary – can meet these historical criteria, at least in the West (Modi’s BJP may be a different story). It’s hard not to wonder if this historicism serves to rob the term of its utility.Their book​ isn’t concerned with the right, however, but with left-populist responses to the post-2008 world. The potted narratives offered are ...”

“... and goods in real time and never got further than resembling a set for a bad sci-fi movie. It may be that the latest AI technology will soon be able to ‘do’ freedom as Hayek understood it. Perhaps liberation isn’t only for humans after all. But there are grounds for Hayekians to be nervous of Silicon Valley’s ambitions in this area – let alone ...”

“... city living that it’s hard at first to parse the connection, though the chateau in Alençon may be just out of the frame. Yet Watteau, admired by the French Symbolists for his balance of gaiety and melancholy, is not un-Tonksian. His great subject was sad clowns; it might be hers too. Walter Pater said that Watteau ‘was always a seeker after something ...”