“... for all their showing off, Summers and Lindley did beat the rest of the BBC into Egyptian-held territory in 1973. It could be brave and revelatory: a report from Vietnam in 1966 so enraged the American press with its footage of civilian casualties and unhappy American conscripts that the Washington Post implied its reporter should be censored. Or it ...”

“... ut-Tahrir couldn’t recite their prayers correctly. Bakri said that a training session would be held, but it never materialised. At home, Husain shut himself in his room: ‘My life,’ he writes, ‘was consumed by fury, inner confusion, a desire to dominate everything, and my abject failure to be a good Muslim.’ Gradually extremism lost its appeal. He ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... him; one of them, Zeus, is saved by a trick and gives him an emetic; he vomits them up and is then held captive in Tartarus. The nastiness of the two stories is the same.) The Jakob Freud who emerges from The Interpretation of Dreams is unrelievedly abject. The most famous instance is not a dream but a memory: the insistent, resonant story of humiliation that ...”

“... let alone conspiratorial, opposition to his proceedings. Sir Thomas More died for a devoutly held principle, for which he had to die, not as a conspirator. The Observant Franciscans and Carthusians who were bloody victims of the Henrician Reformation (Elton wrote of monks who were ‘foolish enough to get themselves hanged’) were not involved in ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... At least rhetorically, at least momentarily, aesthetic autonomy and political commitment were held together. After the next world war, they would diverge again, with the celebrated debate between Adorno and Sartre only one indication of the gap.The internal politics of Surrealism were also fraught. Although purges are as common in artistic movements as in ...”

“... people who happen to carry their genes today have no moral right to repossess Neanderthal fossils held in museums. Part of the muddle stems from the seductive analogy between peoples and species. Evolutionary theory undoes the notion that a species might remain fixed over the very long term, a point that Qureshi makes beautifully in her description of the ...”

“... exes are a hard-publishing lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his ...”

“... a climax to two decades in which his year had pivoted on Rome’s big March exhibition, held at the Pantheon, and its August one, at San Giovanni Decollato. Xavier Salomon, in a catalogue essay about these artist-organised events, describes Rosa reaching ‘a level of panic, over-working and exhaustion every summer, in the Roman heat’, as he ...”

“... a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was ‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’. (According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has long known ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history. I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead. In the musical-historical imagination – with its New York v. California, but especially its punk v. hippie oppositions – the Dead ought to be the ...”