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“... a learned woman), spoken of by 19th-century European visitors to the Orient such as Edward Lane and Flaubert. The almeh was a courtesan of sorts, but a woman of significant accomplishments. Dancing was only one of her gifts: others were the ability to sing and recite classical poetry, to discourse wittily, to be sought after for her company by ...”

“... actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far less tolerance for the disorder and tyranny that people like Nkrumah, Lumumba and Nasser instigated in the name of anti-colonialism. A ...”

“... largely WASP Establishment parallels Lippmann’s own. Perhaps, too, there could have been more said about Lippmann’s unpleasantly constricted personal life, and about his second wife, who before Lippmann won her had been married to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, and one of Lippmann’s closest friends, and who quite simply turned ...”

“... operations in Pahlavi Iran, and who remains in control of similar operations now, has often said that he could change the regime with a handful of strong men willing to preside over ten thousand deaths), it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted ...”

“... odd Oedipal outburst from me punctuating his total dominance of his lumbering old dad. Once when I said something about the need occasionally to compliment one’s opponent on a good shot, Wadie, normally a gentle and considerate fellow, dismissed the suggestion as something no coach of his ever taught. The idea was to win as decisively, perhaps as punitively ...”

“... outpost settlements’ established since Sharon came to power in March 2001), though nothing is said about removing the others, which account for about 200,000 settlers on the West Bank and Gaza, to say nothing of the 200,000 more in annexed East Jerusalem. Phase Two, described as a transition, is focused rather oddly on the ‘option of creating an ...”

“... Bulgaria co-existing somehow on the same continent. There is, as every traveller to America has said, a stratum of monotonous sameness in the country, of regimented, mass-produced uniformity, of a pervasive unchanging pallidness that one associates with the Middle West or the Plains, which communicates the tremendous loneliness and anonymity to be found in ...”

“... master an alien world, engaging his reader with characters and even bulls, much as Tolstoy, it was said, could make us feel what it is like to be a horse. The massive edifice of Death in the Afternoon stands, like a tower on a rock, on top of Hemingway’s obsession with death. Bullfighting is the art of sustaining, prolonging and containing the encounter with ...”

“... that gives his work both its confident knowingness and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination ...”

“... a generous amount of mainly instrumental and vocal music at very close range indeed. What must be said immediately is how well, how enviably well, Rosen knows this music, its secrets, its astonishing harmonic and structural innovations, and the problems and pleasures of its performance: he writes not as a musicologist but as an extremely literate pianist (the ...”

“... and symbols of freedom, their captors into subhuman beasts. To this end the New York Times said editorially on 22 January, ‘Let there be rage and revulsion in those first hours of release,’ and then, having reflected for a while, came up with the following questions on 28 January: ‘What should have been done? Mining harbours, or landing ...”

“... three falafels. I stopped to pick up one of the little paperback volumes and, leafing through it, said contemptuously: ‘Five piastres for this?’ ‘No,’ came the quick reply, ‘take them all for five piastres.’ I ended up with a copy for half a piastre, and realised when speaking with my father about the publisher, Franklin Publications, that the ...”

“... for a year. By 13 June, Beirut was under siege, even though the Israeli Government had originally said it planned to go no further into Lebanon than the Awali River, 35 km north of the border. Later, it became all too clear that Sharon was trying to kill Yasir Arafat by bombing everything around him. There was a blockade of humanitarian aid; water and ...”

“... bureaucrats, on average even less educated and qualified than before’. (There isn’t enough said, however, about the disappointment later generated in the same committed people, many of whom were mystified by the sudden cancellation of the whole enterprise and the abject and ugly concession to ‘free market’ doctrines that followed.) Hobsbawm’s ...”

“... in Tunisia and had left the country in some haste, shortly after the June War. Foucault had said at the time that the reason he left had been his horror at the ‘anti-semitic’ anti-Israel riots of the time, common in every Arab city after the great Arab defeat. A Tunisian colleague of his in the University of Tunis philosophy department told me a ...”