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“... offshore island otherwise describable as the landmass of Europe and Asia is that by so doing one may avoid all direct contact with the English literary establishment, which I have nonetheless managed to enter with the publication of a novel called Wales’ Work.1 In Paris, where I have lived even longer than Graham Greene, avoiding literature is not ...”

“... of Defence for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces, that Robert Scheer heard the phrase from which he took the title of his book: ‘if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.’ The shovels, Mr Jones explained, were for digging holes in the ground. These would be covered somehow or other ...”

“... Especially you who have not made confession Since yesterday, or else these trepidatious Phantoms may flit before your uncleansed presence, Or Cacodaemon with his greasy jowls Gulp you right down and flense your sin-drenched shanks!’ Act Four. A local yokel, The Boy Martyr, Is hauled out to the stake. He knows Lang’s game, But still he’s ...”

“... ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether ...”

“... brain is essentially the same as in the old body (no strange hormonal rushes). Even so, there may be limits on how different one’s new body can be if one is to remain the same person. I may feel I’m most essentially a mental self, that my identity is in some deep way independent of my body, but ‘I am not merely ...”

“... 2011 revolt has already produced two novels that are diametrically opposed in their approach. Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins is a kinetic, docudrama-style retelling of the protest movement as seen by its young vanguard. It is interspersed with real tweets and newspaper quotes, and flaunts its true-to-life cachet: it is dedicated to Alaa Abdel ...”

“... at the Prague Jewish cemetery: “ ‘What’s left for us?” I asked. “Only time,” said Robert. “But there’s not much of it.” ’ Indiscriminate murder of civilian populations is, alas, at least as old as recorded history. What differentiates the modern German version, as has often been observed, is its implementation through industrial ...”

“... or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which ...”

“... the Arbat, with their undisguised attacks on Stalinism, have already indicated the direction which may soon be taken by the Gorbachevite Communist leaders. Gorbachev’s own language has been curiously indirect. His speech to the January 1987 Plenum referred repeatedly to the years of ‘stagnancy’ under Brezhnev as being the product of social and political ...”

“... biography is said, though I have never seen any public announcement, to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of ...”

“... voyage to Australia in the early 19th century: that is all, apart from a letter from the Reverend Robert James Colley to his sister, purloined by Talbot and pasted into the journal. Only the title of the novel suggests anything different. ‘Rites of passage’ is a term out of 20th-century anthropology and sits oddly here, warning that Mr Golding means more ...”

“... entirely wrong to regard Gash, Tory or not, as a narrow historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof ...”

“... Manning wished his biographer to be J.E.C. Bodley, Sir Charles Dilke’s private secretary, but he may well not have said so to Purcell. Yet, with every allowance made, Purcell does seem to have behaved in a manner that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the ...”

“... is known to us all in a general way. Nor can we say that the huge armaments still in being may not yet threaten our future. We are only just pulling away from the abyss and there is still much need of cool and careful thought as well as full information about the nuclear issue and its origins. David Holloway explains that ‘the central theme of this ...”

“... introduction, by Carole Fink. Readers who have derived their idea of what the war was like from Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque or Vera Brittain may be surprised, and even slightly shocked, by what they find in these pages. There is no bitterness towards those held responsible for the war, no sense of betrayal by the ...”