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“... East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the US from the UK some thirty years ago to teach at Princeton. His fervent anti-Communism and disapproval of everything about contemporary Arabs and Islam pushed him to the forefront of the ...”

“... And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ‘crisis fiction’ of the ...”

“... finally concerned with the onset of modernity in the world’s ‘first new nation’, as Seymour Martin Lipset described the United States. The quest to identify the origins, sources and nature of modernity is perhaps the grandest project of the human sciences – which is not to say that it lends itself to asking useful questions about particular ...”

“... about the Slump and how to cure it, and, by extension, right about the Old Gang blocking his path? Martin Pugh’s publishers tell us breathlessly that ‘this book demonstrates for the first time how close Britain came to being a Fascist state in the interwar years.’ Is that a fact or just a pretty piece of hype? Does the limelight that Mosley continued to ...”

“... Louisa, as she called herself, or the lurid stories she published under the pseudonym of A.P. Bernard can imagine Alcott truly enjoying what was steady and slow. Alcott used another English text, Pilgrim’s Progress, to structure the first 24 chapters of Little Women, which were published in October 1868. She was desperate to earn money for her ...”

“... of the bright new talent that was assembled – a formidable roll-call including such names as Bernard Levin, Katharine Whitehorn, Alan Brien and Cyril Ray. Certainly, by the late Fifties the Spectator had already put the wind up the New Statesman – and may even have been partly responsible for the departure of its long-serving editor, Kingsley ...”

“... and war, and the selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen ...”

“... reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the related fiscal consequences of war.Lockheed Martin Annual Report, 1 March 2005Well, it was a just war in the beginning.Michael Walzer, 3 December 2009RAMBO IN AFGHANISTAN. A screening of Rambo III at the Duck and Cover. Wear a headband for $1 off drinks.Email chain invitation, US ...”

“... of containment beyond blokish reticence. ‘We almost weren’t like a band,’ the guitarist, Bernard Sumner, writes in Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division and Me. ‘We were more like four individuals doing our own thing.’* This beautifully produced book unframes Curtis’s words and places them beside the books he read and the fan mail he ...”

“... the Left, but by no means all are intellectuals. There is not only Professor Raymond Williams but Bernard Dix of NUPE and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but ...”

“... Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget it. Bernard Malamud? Unreadable. What about someone as prolific as Joyce Carol Oates? She’s a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium or in Shea or in a field with hundreds of thousands (laughs). She does all the graffiti in the men’s ...”

“... punctuated by the incessant drip-drop of tiny signifying moments’. Some of these he recorded: MARTIN: Well, you gel orders to burn a village, and a gook tries to put the fire out while you’re trying to burn his hootch. He fucks with you, and you show him that you can fuck with him. You can push him away, or you can kick his ass, or you can do what we ...”

“... from the top down. A ‘tiny élite’ created the nation, and Johnson offers no sense of what Bernard Bailyn calls the ‘contagion of liberty’ – the way small farmers, urban labourers and even slaves seized on the patriotic ideology to advance their own claims. Johnson’s account of the late 19th century offers an excellent description of ...”

“... Arab Peoples. When that book was published in 1991 it was strongly criticised by Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer for presenting Arab history as largely a matter of continuities, negotiated accommodations and glowing cultural achievements, underplaying the wars, factional fighting, despotism, religious bigotry and poverty. In a review in the TLS, I took much ...”

“... misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about Irving, but attacking Gray causes wrathful indignation among Holocaust dogmatists. I sought to learn from men who became monsters, such ...”