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“... to make sense of it all. At least, Naomi Shepherd starts out that way, though her thirty years in Israel have led her to a grave, almost pessimistic outlook. London-bred, Oxford-educated, she became the Israel correspondent for the New Statesman in the Sixties, under John Freeman’s editorship: it was then possible to see ...”

“... as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time native Islamists, aware of their weakness in the ...”

“... ritualised way of life. These meanings have held fast for centuries. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874 that ‘colonisation is a considered act, subject to rules, which can only originate in highly advanced societies. Savages and barbarians sometimes – even often – emigrate [but] only civilised peoples colonise.’The ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”

“... East through the lens of ‘violent extremism’ has predictable consequences with respect to Israel, Palestine and Iran. Careful to acknowledge that Palestinians deserve ‘the self-determination that Americans take for granted’, Clinton nevertheless blithely defends the Israeli air war on Gaza: ‘Every country has the right to defend itself.’ You ...”

“... that even the great Jewish leader Isaac Abravanel failed to understand where the true destiny of Israel lay, leading his followers only as far as Naples. For Netanyahu, the idea of the Jews as a raza was expounded with unprecedented vehemence and on a devastatingly wide scale in 15th-century Spain. The ‘Old Christian’, it might be said, defined him or ...”

“... photographs of survivors struggling to reach Palestine; the triumphant founding of the state of Israel. The final galleries also contain a re-creation of a hut from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, as if to return to the illusions out of which the tragedy grew. Yad Vashem begins with a room: a full-scale model of a middle-class German-Jewish parlour ...”

“... voice of moderation, with a proper commitment to multilateralism, other voices are audible, too. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, has spoken of ‘ending states which support terrorism’, and in the case of Iraq, there are those who would now like to complete the work of the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein. Here, too, the mood of ...”

“... a Common Future: Connecting, Innovating, Transforming’. It is to be held in Kigali, hosted by Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president for the last two decades: proof enough of his continued good standing in the West. In Britain and beyond, he is credited with ending the genocide of 1994 – ‘one of the fastest killing sprees in human history’, as Michela ...”

“... 17-year-old Isidore Isou posed himself the same question then being asked of the founding of Israel: how to build a better world than the one around him? The answer came to him as an illumination – or perhaps as mania. ‘All must be revealed in letters.’ Words had, he thought, done great damage throughout history. By breaking them down and exposing ...”

“... it were the fruit of a conceptual slip. This is not to belittle his substantive commentary on US-Israel relations. Mann calls the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ‘the running sore of US foreign policy’. When he writes that the ‘US failure to control Israel is irrational,’ he means that he cannot explain it. Why should ...”

“... Democrat. Among the neoconservative Democrats who moved over to join the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon. According to Mann’s collective biography of the ‘Vulcans’, the key decision-makers in the new Republican defence establishment, Wolfowitz ‘got out just in time’, resigning from the Carter ...”

“... on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be the father of the US navy – I ...”

“... Pentateuch must be pre-exilic because of the great interest it shows in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This large region (later known as Samaria), originally inhabited by the sons of Joseph, became a powerful and prosperous province of the Persian Empire. Schniedewind asks why biblical editors in the post-exilic period should have written so much about the ...”

“... authenticity, and its origin may be traced to that codifier of male dominance in marriage, St Paul. In II Corinthians iii, Paul seeks to abolish the distinction between readers of written texts or ‘epistles of commendation’ and the writers of such texts. He asserts that ‘ye’ – the Corinthians he is addressing ...”