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“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... backstory (not a psychopath haunted by childhood trauma, just a guy who’s good at murder). Victor is a novelist for whom success is always just out of reach; it finally comes with a slim, philosophically minded, dashed-off novel, published to massive acclaim a few weeks after he takes his own life. Lucie is a thirtyish film editor, vexed by her ...”

“... but as heroic underdogs. They were shown on television being shot and beaten by Israeli soldiers. David the good guy was now a Palestinian, and nasty Goliath an Israeli. The women and the old joined in to support the uprising, and all were soon aware that the use of stones rather than guns was their strongest political card in the vital game to win the ...”

“... is the story, told in Philip Hoare’s 1995 biography, of Coward’s visit to the Court to see David Storey’s grittily realistic Rugby League play The Changing Room. His attention having been drawn to the male genitalia on display in the bath scene, Coward remarked: ‘13 acorns are not worth the price of admission.’ ‘Not worth the price of ...”

“... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...”

“... loyalty, it emerges, is something of an Israeli speciality. As one anti-Communist supporter of David Ben-Gurion put it, in a reference to leftist immigrants from the Soviet Union: ‘In our relations with the USA we have in that country a fifth column, whereas in our dealings with the Soviet Union they have a fifth column here.’ The problem of dual ...”

“... see them raze the ruins and build a ‘city of towers’ on modernistic lines. In a similar way, Victor Hugo remarked of the post-Napoleonic Bourbons that ‘nothing is more decrepit than at the moment of its restoration.’ The editors of this volume might agree with such sentiments. Their book contains knowledgeable and entertaining contributions. Hugh ...”

“... been ‘Frankenstein Revisited’. It’s hard to get Mel Brooks out of one’s mind here, but Victor Frankenstein’s real achievement was to create life – out of bits and pieces of dead bodies to be sure. In Scott’s movie a creature who looks not like Victor but an athletic version of his creature drinks a small ...”

“... savour the flowery death by the obsidian knife’, his predestined fate to be as much victim as victor. The purpose of the Flowery War was not conquest but the taking of captives, the battles consisting of a series of individual combats between warriors decked out in the finery of jaguar skins and eagle feathers. As Clendinnen observes, ‘the great ...”

“... at the corner of the place des Vosges that I used to drop into after visiting the Musée Victor Hugo or the Follains’ apartment, completely transformed into a chic newly antiquated tea-shop. Got a last free table before queues started. Dinner 8.30 chez Jean-Claude and Annick. Other guest a young poet, Jacques Lèvre, whom Jean-Claude thinks very ...”

“... learned, was his literary executor; I was told that she was of Algerian origin. Another was Pierre Victor, a former Maoist and co-publisher with Sartre of the now defunct Gauche prolétarienne, who had become a deeply religious and, I supposed, Orthodox Jew; it stunned me to find out later from one of the journal’s assistants that he was an Egyptian Jew ...”

“... Any reflection​ on Victor Hugo risks degenerating into a procession of superlatives. Poet, dramatist, novelist, romantic, reactionary, revolutionary, mystic, miser and indefatigable philanderer: without him French literature, French politics of the 19th century are unimaginable. The scope of his ambition, the range of his genius, the vastness of his output, the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ghetto; David Sassoon (1792-1864), heir to a distinguished Baghdadi-Jewish dynasty, who fled the political machinations of his hometown for British India; Joseph Evzel Gunzburg (1812-78), an alcohol magnate from Podolia with a prestigious rabbinic genealogy stretching ...”

“... than a nun’s bouquet’ could have been written by Lampedusa; so could his dismissal of Victor Hugo as a ‘real charlatan’. Like Don Fabrizio’s, the Senyor’s life oscillates between moments of sensuality and periods of austere contemplation. Like Don Fabrizio, he is a rationalist who knows that his class has no future. Convinced that the ...”