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“... 1960s – sometimes in a single scene. In the book’s most delirious section, he is imprisoned in Israel, after being found in possession of books by Kafka and Proust, and harangued by a sabra (Israeli-born) general: No one is interested in hearing about the angst, the malaise, the tears, the hard luck story of the Jews. No one! We don’t want to hear ...”

“... a rather mad piece in a recent New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick compared Rushdie to ‘a little Israel’, surrounded as he was by ravening Muslim wolves, and also remarked on the evident expansion of his waistline since the last time she saw him in public. Ms Ozick, as it happens, is rather keen on the expansion of the Israeli midriff as it extends over ...”

“... but Schapiro’s gifts are quite outstanding. Here he is writing about mosaic pavements in Israel: No part of the surface is, strictly speaking, a neutral ground. From this uniformity of the tiny elements arises a typical texture and rhythm and a scale of proportions of parts to the whole. Many objects – a petal, an eye, a nostril – are ...”

“... along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a box at the Paris Opera during a performance of The Barber of Seville, and chose to throw away his major pieces one by one, finishing with the most elegant mate imaginable. In ...”

“... cannot wait.’ And even as critics of the war were focusing their anger on the neo-Jacobinism of Paul Wolfowitz and Co, the old Metternich hand was, as Bob Woodward reported, exerting a ‘powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy’, regularly meeting with the president and Cheney, dusting off his old Vietnam-era memos to urge the ...”

“... two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American ...”

“... yards away a dozen Hasidic Jews were holding a pro-Palestinian banner and another that read: ‘Israel Does Not Represent World Jewry.’ ‘They like the Palestinians?’ Roberto said. ‘That’s pretty weird. I used to live in the Middle East. They’ve been fighting each other there for two thousand years.’ He told me he had also lived in the UK and ...”

“... to be his wife. He then cuts the body into 12 pieces and sends one to each of the 12 tribes of Israel, who are thereby urged to take vengeance against the Benjamites and to slaughter them. The story ends with still more violence as the males of the tribe of Jabesh are killed and their virgins forcibly married to the Benjamites so that they can restore ...”

“... surprising. Touching on another potentially delicate area, Walter Rockier remarked: ‘The case of Israel and the West Bank is of no relevance in this context, since that aggression happened as the result of a war.’ Nobody took him up on this contentious statement. The main Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, which took place over 1945-6, was ...”

“... carry much more power than others. One would have to search hard to find critical coverage of Israel in the US mainstream media; not many op-ed columns in the UK national press advocate socialist revolution. Often it’s those who most vigorously defend liberal positions elsewhere who most actively police acceptable speech at home – especially when it ...”

“... Tcherniak was born to Jewish parents on 18 July 1900 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in Russia. Her father, Israel (Ilya) Tcherniak, had built up a factory producing industrial dyes. Her mother, Khina Perl (Polina) Chatounovskaya, was – or rather struggled to become – a writer. She published just two novels, both of which Jefferson finds underwhelming. Sarraute’s ...”

“... compared Hillary Clinton’s defeat to watching Joan of Arc burning at the stake. Obama was in St Paul, Minnesota, pointedly in the very arena where the Republicans will hold their convention in September, at times barely audible over the nearly continual cheering of 17,000 fans (with another 15,000 listening outside). Clinton was off on what has come to be ...”

“... Liberal Party and then high commissioner to the UK. In June, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. In July, after the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was widely reported, Downer informed American intelligence about his conversation with Papadopoulos. The FBI investigated and found ...”

“... War, the Second World War – as soldier, prisoner or diplomat – terrorism and nationalism in Israel and in Wales. Dan is taken prisoner by the Germans. It is while he is trying to make his way back from the camp that he sees the sword – a relic stolen from Monte Casino. This German loot becomes Russian loot and eventually Welsh loot. One of the good ...”

“... his role in the foreign policy field as that of ‘vicar’. The word, borrowed, it seems, from Paul Nitze thirty years before, appeared to claim either too much or too little. It suggested either its 13th-century meaning of ‘God’s representative on earth’ or the picture of a genial, slightly comic fellow in bicycle clips played by Miles Malleson. It ...”