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“... some intellectuals have been thought to have difficulty in changing their socks. Bertrand Russell, Paul Johnson reports, was unable to make himself a cup of tea. The term came to currency with the classifications employed in the Marxist system, and has been used to deplore the scarcity in this country of a certain someone supposedly thick on the European ...”

“... to 12 years’ imprisonment, he was released after the Allied victory in 1945 and emigrated to Israel. Gustloff’s body was carried back to Schwerin, where he was buried with full honours. In 1937, the year after his death, the Wilhelm Gustloff was christened by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser ...”

“... Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t know,’ replies the author. ‘It was the truth,’ he adds as an aside. ‘It was too early in my Mediterranean journey for me to tell whether it might be a book ...”

“... WASPs. His Dr Strangelove accent remained a lifelong reminder of his émigré status. (Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister at the time, told him that her foreign minister spoke better English than he did.) Yet after becoming a naturalised American at the age of twenty he liked to describe himself in terms of his adopted country’s folklore. He told a ...”

“... were almost exclusively rewarded for these ‘services’ with high honours. His connections with Israel and with businessmen who shared apparently contradictory interests in Eastern European countries and in Israel, were far too close and cosy for a properly democratic political leader. The land deals at Wigan, from which ...”

“... Turks, Castilian gentlemen from the past, the 12 Peers of France and the Tribes of Israel’. Zurbarán is also known to have given a set of Jacob and His 12 Sons to the local convent of San Jerónimo de Buenavista in 1659 in order to settle a debt. ‘Joseph’ Central to Zurbarán’s method was his use of models and motifs from prints by ...”

“... is that Zionism and Judaism are one and the same; both speak of Palestine as the land of Israel; and both regard Arabs on ‘the land of Israel’ as aliens and barely tolerable intruders. Above all, Zionism sees itself as redeeming the land whose natives have called it ‘Palestine’ for a millennium and a ...”

“... Paul Celan was born in 1920 as Paul Antschel, to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina: ‘a posthumously born Kakanier,’ he once said of himself (the city and province of his birth had been ceded to Romania in 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was broken up ...”

“... stated goals. There are of course different groups within this camp: some are more favourable to Israel, others less hostile to China; not all would support the most radical aspects of the programme. However, the basic and generally agreed plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority, and this has been consistently advocated and ...”

“... for international law and an immediate ceasefire.’ Macron had already marked his distance from Israel in April, six months into the onslaught on Gaza, when he signed a joint statement with King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi calling for an immediate ceasefire and stressing ‘our determination to step up our joint efforts to ...”

“... Labour victory, but the story is as fresh as if the boy had written it yesterday. The cyclist, Paul Morton, is expecting to leave his factory and become an air-traffic control assistant, but he is worried about a medical report which may prove him to be tubercular. The dust-cover biography of Alan Sillitoe suggests that the story may be partly ...”

“... in the way the Western media report from the occupied West Bank: when the Israeli Army, in what Israel itself describes as a ‘war’ operation, attacks the Palestinian police and sets about systematically destroying the Palestinian infrastructure, Palestinian resistance is cited as proof that we are dealing with terrorists. This paradox is inscribed into ...”

“... of course the thing that happened last Saturday as well was this very deadly attack by Hamas on Israel. How do you understand that attack? What did you think of that?’‘You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing ...”

“... there are deeper considerations of the kind that Field Marshal Carver raised in Borneo. When Israel knocked out Iraq’s nuclear installations in 1981, acting in pre-emptive self-defence after receiving clear intelligence warnings, it was roundly condemned by Mrs Thatcher: ‘Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote to his publisher in Paris to suggest that he ask Jean-Paul Sartre for a preface to his anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Tell him that every time I sit down at my desk, I think of him.’ For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation ...”