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“... in the Old Testament and the ‘constructive’ physical pain that he inflicts on the people of Israel in order to raise them to the spiritual destiny for which they and their Christian heirs have been chosen. For Christians, we are told, believe 90 per cent of what the Jews believe, and the remaining 10 per cent only served to spread the Bible’s ...”

“... essays become the headnotes to Franzen’s angst. Interspersed are glosses by the American scholar Paul Reitter, who has the thankless job of historically contextualising Kraus’s grievances, and the German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, whose interpretations can be divided into the four categories that Freud apportioned for jokes: the obscene, the ...”

“... January were at any risk of fading, they were rekindled on 28 October, when David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after breaking into their home in San Francisco (she subsequently announced she was standing down as Speaker). DePape shook Pelosi awake with cries of ‘Where’s Nancy?’ – the ...”

“... it in dogmatic opposition to Europe – one conviction he held in common with his predecessor Paul Johnson. To the paper’s role as a mouthpiece of party and an organ of faction he added the role of a megaphone for petty chauvinism. Then came the redesign, with empty logos and ill-sorted photographs. Then the utter want of attention to style (Howard is ...”

“... gnostic and Behmenist), but it may also (less esoterically) find authority in St Paul’s Epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians. These passages, which originated in Paul’s polemics against the slavish observance of Jewish ceremonial and ritual regulations, might be taken to have a much wider ...”

“... seven thousand prisoners were dispatched to Auschwitz a month before the inspectors’ arrival. Dr Paul Eppstein, president of the Judenrat, was appointed mayor for the day, and tasked with leading the Red Cross contingent on a tour; Brundibár, a subversive children’s opera whose villain resembled Hitler, was performed; a football game was played, and there ...”

“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a lot ...”

“... dependence on imported oil is seen as requiring American hegemony over the Middle East; and the Israel lobby has worked assiduously and with extraordinary success to make sure that Israel’s enemies are seen by Americans as also being those of the US. And let’s not forget the role played by the entrenched interests of ...”

“... study falls into older traditions of critique. Like the great early 20th-century historian Paul Hazard, Brockliss wants to push the boundaries of the Enlightenment beyond the ‘little flock of philosophes’, and in particular to identify it with the intellectual phenomenon known as the ‘Republic of Letters’ – an international network of ...”

“... would fire its long-range Scud missiles – equipped with chemical or biological warheads – at Israel, to ‘portray the war as a battle with an American-Israeli coalition and build support in the Arab world’. I heard that Saddam had elaborate and labyrinthine underground bunkers for his protection, and that it might be necessary to employ B61 Mod 11 ...”

“... elsewhere, the favoured colonial minority was always the Islamic one. Perhaps this was because, as Paul Scott has one of his characters say in The Raj Quartet, the British ‘prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground ...”

“... himself gained immense popularity and legitimacy in the process. But his regime lost the Sinai to Israel in 1967 and, in order to get it back, his successor, Anwar Sadat, prostrated Egypt before the United States. It has remained a depressed client state to this day. Sadat increased his own freedom of action by encouraging the army to develop its economic ...”

“... culture minister, who believes that Ulster Protestants are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel, has campaigned against the geological exhibits in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, whose labels seem to suggest – in a way contrived to gull the good people of Ulster into heresy – that the world was in existence long before the accepted date of its ...”

“... spending time in Syria (Mirror to Damascus, 1967), Lebanon (The Hills of Adonis, 1968), Israel and Palestine (Jerusalem, 1969) and Cyprus (Journey into Cyprus, 1975). He was in his late twenties when Mirror to Damascus came out, having worked in publishing and as a documentary filmmaker, and knew what he was doing: each of his books attests to a ...”

“... for saying this, apparently endorsed by Chomsky and certainly held by anarchists like Robert Paul Wolff, is that coercion itself – the state’s big shtick – is never justified. The truth is not that power corrupts, but that power’s rationale is corruption, and the best to be hoped for from its use is not that it makes people better, but that it ...”