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I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line through...more

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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Th...more

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Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a ...more

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Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on...more

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th. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

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I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind o...more

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All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permane...more

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I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on...more

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To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make...more

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Cheap booze is a false economy.

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Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that...more

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During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff....more

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I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though t...more

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In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossess...more

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Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most...more