“... in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews. “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ For all his braggadocio, ‘Ben Nitay’ was still floundering well into the 1970s. He gave occasional speeches in the Boston area on behalf of the Israeli government, which recognised an asset in his special forces ...”

“... from Bernie Sanders that question wouldn’t be surprising. But it was more remarkable to hear William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, describe American business as ‘part of the problem’ because its corporate leaders are too focused on their stock options and have lost sight of the ‘national view’ and the need to ensure that ‘that the next ...”

“... known for an essay published nine years after that. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ stands, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer novels, as a founding text of the late 20th-century cyberculture craze and of 1990s cyberfeminism in particular: ‘While the shiny screens … continued to present themselves as clean-living products of the straight ...”

“... Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews ...”

“... one had been writing in pencil in a large notebook, and now they had gathered, with bottles of white wine standing on the grass between them, and they were settling down to discuss a member of the family whose arrival had been delayed. Was he a contented person, or a discontented person? Did he really belong to the town, or to the country? Would he have ...”

“... in the windows in the hope that she’ll wake up and enliven a dull hour of their beat. Tonight a white car reverses dramatically up the street, screeches to a halt beside the van and a burly young man jumps out and gives the van a terrific shaking. Assuming (hoping, probably) he would have driven off by the time I get outside, I find he’s still there, and ...”

“... There are other philosophers who would have served her purpose better – Hume and Sartre and William James, analysts of reason and the passions of a psychological subtlety beyond Smith’s pretensions. Those names will not make the rats perk up in quite the way Adam Smith does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and ...”

“... of his ‘Rhymes’ upon the onward tide of time than of the snow-falls in the river, A moment white, then melts for ever! It might be some increasing consciousness of the frail tenure by which he holds his rank among the great heirs of Fame, that urged our Bard to pawn his reversion of immortality for an indulgent smile of patrician approbation, as he ...”

“... announce imminent triumph for parties that then lost elections – most spectacularly in 1945. William Maxwell (‘Max’) Aitken, born in 1879, was a restless son of the manse. His father was a Church of Scotland minister from Torphichen, near Linlithgow, who ended up ‘called’ to a congregation in New Brunswick. Max grew up in a heavily Scottish ...”

“... then – I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”’ From this perspective, the White Queen is speaking beguiling sense as well as infuriating nonsense when she says: ‘The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.’ Alice becomes adept at finding ways to stay hungry. She’s never more gleeful than when she sneaks ...”

“... submit estimates of how much it will cost to complete all American-funded projects in Iraq to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office won’t discuss the matter. Earlier this month, Brigadier-General William McCoy told reporters: ‘The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq … This was just ...”

“... death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household. At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the ...”

“... point Milton is willing to ravish the senses rather than simply to suspect them. In Young Milton William Poole describes the 1645 volume as ‘a curious cacophony of radical and conservative voices, anxious to promote both his precocity and prophecy’. That seems exactly right: in this volume potentiality exceeds certainty, and that makes it exciting. It is ...”

“... racism. Emecheta manages this indirectly, by telling the story of Adah’s friend Janet, a white girl married to another Nigerian student, Babalola. Babalola first met Janet while standing outside a phone booth waiting for her to finish a call. ‘It started to drizzle and he was getting soaked to the skin, so he banged on the kiosk door, and shook his ...”

“... Marxist professors and anti-psychiatrists – turned out en masse for the symposium; John Cage and William Burroughs came along; and Foucault flew in from Paris. It quickly became a circus.Deleuze and Guattari had long envied American writers like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, with their ‘gift for ...”