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“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... public life were revealed. He mocks the most celebrated moment of the whole saga, when Mandy Rice-Davies responded to being told that Bill Astor had denied having had sex with her with the line: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ Ever since, worldly commentators have taken this to be a glimmer of straight-talk amid the welter of lies. In a recent ...”

“... From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title, as he explains in his Introduction, is a ‘multiple pun’ composed of one ideogram each from the names of the three principal female protagonists ...”

“... to critique Neorealist movies. Enrico Pasquali’s images of the bare-legged female mondine (rice workers) of the Po Valley having their lunch in the fields demystify the glamorous icon established by Silvana Mangano in De Santis’s hit Bitter Rice (1949).The fortnightly publication Cinema Nuovo was established in ...”

“... is only honourable to point out that I am mentioned critically in these pages, so that the Mandy Rice-Davies response applies to my criticisms. McAleer suggests I am guilty of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose arguments. I think he sees sleights (just as his duellists saw slights) where none exist. Perhaps I should send my seconds to the author with a proposal: I ...”

“... the conventional advisers of the Clinton-Obama circle – Jake Sullivan, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Thomas Donilon, Ash Carter, Michèle Flournoy. It is hard to imagine any of them straying far from the Cold War groove of shepherding Nato against Russia and finding a field for occasional military exercise in a humanitarian war. Yet Biden in the past has ...”

“... positives is minuscule. Hayden​ never quite made it into the inner circle of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and George Tenet, CIA director until 2004. By the time he became CIA director, the job had lost some of its importance. Post-9/11 reforms had handed many of its biggest perks, including daily access to the president, to the director of national ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... Americans seem to relish Presidential biographies. David McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker ...”

“... positive potential for developing agricultures of, say, drought-resistant maize or salt-tolerant rice, can we exclude the possibility that the exotic strains introduced will cause havoc in the indigenous crops of these countries? And these are only the predictable risks. These very new, and very complex, procedures could, after all, produce disastrous ...”

“... on their compatibility with humans. Some prospered, either through domestication (livestock, rice) or because they found niches in a human-dominated biosphere (rats, crabgrass, the tuberculosis bacillus). Others proved incapable of domestication (bison, the blue whale) or unable to adjust (the gorilla, the smallpox virus) and faced extinction. Reviewing ...”

“... In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or ‘demand-led’. Two years ago, 70,000 people used food banks and now 347,000 do. ‘What is a supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know ...”

“... well as the National Security Strategy of September 2002, largely written by Condoleezza Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state ...”

“... its will on an uneasy and reluctant political hierarchy. In an interview with my co-author Desmond Rice and myself after the publication of our book The Sinking of the ‘Belgrano’ last year, he gave this account: We just about got the War Cabinet to agree that we should repossess South on the way down. These [the Ministers] thought that would get bogged ...”