“... dark. These areas have been hit hardest by the rise in the price of basic goods. In Douar Hicher, north-west of the city centre, I saw residents marching through the streets and burning tyres. In Mornag, another working-class neighbourhood, similar actions have been repressed with tear gas. When I travelled north through ...”

“... locally elected town and village councils had pooled the cost of the dikes and dams that kept the North Sea out of their homes: here we see in embryo some of the characteristic devices of a market-based economy. So when the defeat of the Armada unlocked the trade routes of the world to the newly independent republic, open frontiers beckoned Dutch sailors from ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... you feel, so that Kiberd could play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... at all between knowing you want to pee and then just peeing. I was at Plimpton’s funeral in St John the Divine not long ago, and they sat me near the front, you know. Suddenly, I had to go. I knew I wasn’t gonna make it all the way down the aisle so I spotted a little side door and I got the canes and nipped in there. Halfway down the corridor, I was ...”

“... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...”

“... the giant vigilante organisation which centres on Pietersburg. Founded by a black businessman, John Magolego, Mapogo now has 35,000 paid up members, 10,000 of them white – it’s a booming business. It moves into an area, rounds up criminal suspects, beats the hell out of them, drags them behind vans on rocky roads or dangles them over crocodile-infested ...”

“... in on territory that doesn’t, strictly speaking, belong to them. Carolyn, in stately exile in North London, calls into question the eternal present-tense rush of On the Road. They can’t both be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to ...”

“... the past twenty years a particularly virulent and specifically American component as settlers from North America have come to Israel bringing as their contribution a deeply typical combination of ideological heedlessness and indiscriminate violence. Baruch Goldstein is not a particularly unusual case: a man steeped in long-distance fantasies of a Jewish ...”

“... out, ‘the fastest growing group of towns was not London and the industrial aggregations of the North and Midlands but watering places and holiday resorts.’ The one novelist in the period this reminds me of is Thomas Hardy, especially in The Mayor of Casterbridge. That novel is full of improvised ceremonies, either wholly concocted or adapted from some ...”

“... memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All traditional cultures ...”

“... War (Walzer endorses this opposition without offering any justification) and for his criticism of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann for writing pro-war propaganda. He is also (like all those up to this point in the rankings) considered methodologically sound by Walzer: ‘studying and clarifying the ideas of American democracy’ was, Bourne said, the ...”

“... and others associated with the Brownings; and Athlone, who hold the distribution rights outside North America, are no longer the University of London Press. Without generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities in America the project could not have continued. The NEH can, for once, be assured without qualification that its money is being ...”