On Ariel Sharon

Why does Sharon enjoy a 55% approval rating? Because Sharon is the first Prime Minister in many long years who is not being attacked and battered by the interminable reproaches, conspiracies, premises and provocations of Ariel Sharon.

On low interest rates

Interest rates that are low by historic standards are doing strange things to a financial system that is highly deregulated. Note, in passing, the astonishing fact that most of the assets of US financial institutions are not subject to the risk-based capital regime and supervisory conditions that apply to US banks. This is because a high proportion of US financial activity now takes place outside of the banking system, in institutions ranging from non-banks such as GE Capital to giant hedge funds.

John le Carre, Ian Fleming and Joseph Heller

Ian Fleming was a fantasist of England in the post-war period: Carre is no realist. He is a novelist of small defeats and large disillusions, a novelist, in other words, of the period we are living in. (I'm almost tempted to say he is the first novelist of the Cold War and in his novel he has read the Cold War in the light of World War Two - which is, incidentally, a more sensible undertaking than Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which represented World War Two as if it were already the Cold War.)

John le Carre and Elmore Leonard

John le Carre has maintained that for the late twentieth century at least, the spy novel is the central fictional form because it alone tackles the implementations of the hidden agendas that - we suspect, and as the evening news tends to confirm - surround us on all sides. Similarly, Elmore Leonard might argue - if he were given to argument, which he is not - that a novel with some sort of a crime or a scam in it can hardly claim to be an accurate representation of today's reality.

Field Marshall Montgomery on Vietnam

The US has broken the second rule of war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. Rule One is don't march on Moscow. I developed these two rules myself.

Boris Johnson on racism

Racism is like sewage: something that a civilised society will manage and channel.

Tony Judt on Israel

The problem of Israel is that it has arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international laws. The very idea of a Jewish state - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel is, in short, an anachronism.