This week’s issue of the Spectator is packed with book reviews. Here’s a selection of quotes to whet your appetite. Old China hand Jonathan Mirsky finds much to applaud in Rana Mitter’s history of the Sino-Japanese war. ‘Into the Fifties, as Mitter outlines, a storm gathered in the US over ‘who lost China’; and those
‘He’s caught a drone.’
‘I’m preventable death.’
‘Besides drink a lot, what does your daddy do, Thomas?’
‘Oh come on, guys. I’m a dinosaur! Kids love dinosaurs.’
‘The children are playing shop.’
‘I’m expecting a cherub.’
‘Any-of-the-major-credit-cards-a-job week...’
‘This must be the Ring road.’
‘Wait a minute – what about my severance package?’
‘I don’t want a haircut — I just dropped in to talk about where I’m going this summer.’
‘We did comparative religion at school today, Mum.’
‘I guess they’re just trying to deal with the psychological torture of being in captivity.’
Being good without God Sir: It is a rash person who tangles with the Chief Rabbi, but his piece on ‘Atheism and barbarism’ (15 June) shocked me. After championing until his last paragraph the old lie that religious belief is a necessary foundation for morality, he suddenly says he doesn’t believe ‘that you have to
Painting the town The tarting-up of Northern Irish villages on the route between Belfast International airport and Lough Erne, the resort which hosted the G8 summit, has been likened to the ‘Potemkin villages’ employed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s to impress foreign visitors. But is the concept of a Potemkin village itself a
