“... had edited Panorama with a sure hand ... And when Peacock left there was the burly figure of Paul Fox ready to step into his shoes as Controller of BBC 1 ...’ Lumpen-paragraphs sit upon each other gracelessly, heavy with dull and often clumsily conveyed management detail. Michael Swann is a ‘man with a highly distinguished scientific background, a ...”

“... the same, of course, but in this case the dating was pretty precise. It was ten years since John, Paul, George and Ringo had recorded their first session together at the Akustik, a small studio in Hamburg (apparently a single 78 rpm copy of ‘Summertime’ still survives); and Lennon’s declaration that ‘the dream is over’ in ‘God’, track ten on ...”

“... In​ 2011 Paul Kingsnorth announced his withdrawal from the environmental movement after twenty years of activism. Environmentalists, he complained in a long article published in Orion magazine, had stopped caring about the environment: ‘We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability”’, which means ‘sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so ...”

“... There are two stories to tell about Paul Robeson – one sad and the other tragic. Both could be constructed from the ample data in this heavy, ill-focused, yet informative concatenation of computerised database, research grant and exclusive access to the subject’s papers. In the first a young Negro of high intelligence, great physical strength and grace, musically talented and gifted with a resonant bass voice, is induced by a dominant white culture to fill various roles – social, professional and indeed dramatic – formulated for blacks to perform ...”

“... a greater acoustic life. This is a small point, however; and any loss is more than made up for by Paul Hammond’s splendid notes, easy to read at the foot of the same page, and full of the most fascinating matter. Absalom and Achitophel is a storehouse of social and political history; and this text enables us to learn or to recall it without effort, to enjoy ...”

“... thought that Kunming was a bit like the vicarage at Duxford near Cambridge; the artist Paul Hogarth wrote that travelling from Beijing to Shanghai was much the same as going from Sheffield to Manchester. More perilously, the delegates tried to demystify the Chinese present by equating it with brave bits of the English past. The rural co-operatives ...”

“... these two judgments – from the emperor he would destroy and the poet he had sent into exile – lay the whole mess of contradictions that was the life and reign of Alexander I. Marie-Pierre Rey acknowledges the tsar’s contradictions, but manages to extract from them a remarkably coherent image of a principled man who embraced constitutionalism when it ...”

“... and the name Moscow is probably Finnish in origin. Remote and surrounded by thick forest, it lay well off the main path until the 13th century, when its concealed location gave the Riurikid princes and their Orthodox churchmen an advantage over the invading Mongols. The fort was less accessible to nomadic cavalry than Kiev and Vladimir, their previous ...”

“... Long before the sin of Orientalism was discovered, Paul Bowles had frequently been guilty of it, in word, in thought and in deed. In his first stories, for example, the natives are shining examples of naked otherness, created partly to refresh our view concerning the mixture of simplicity, guile and sexual beauty available in remote places ...”

“... forms of guile by which women have been supposed to arouse a man’s desire in order to lay hands on his money, rather than match his lust with their own. Chanel’s celebrated inventions clothe a female creature who is all the more sexually interesting for being nobody’s doll, besides being nobody’s fool. Even further, they suggest an ...”

“... the analysis of a system of doctrine. Monographs exist on Johnson’s moral thought – notably, Paul Alkon’s Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967). Studying them, however, one begins to suspect that the authors have agreed to veil the embarrassing limitations of Johnson’s insight, and to represent his conscience as closer to ours than a genealogist ...”

“... had done so for longer: an unconditional zapadnik, he was convinced that the future of the country lay in the achievement of the type of orderly and durable freedom responsible for the success of Western societies. But he felt less repressed rage – virtually none – against the communist system than most of his friends or acquaintances. He neither feared ...”

“... officer turned tech startup millionaire before he went into politics, he felt the solution lay in Israel’s lucrative tech frontrunners – in particular, a boutique cyber-hacking company from Herzliya called NSO.The company had made its reputation with its Pegasus software, designed to infiltrate mobile phones. Pegasus has ...”

“... back on a CIC invention, The Rat Line to South America, originally conceived by James Milano and Paul Lyon for the virtuous purpose of rescuing former Allied agents from the rapid fall of the Iron Curtain. The Line was soon controlled by Dr Krunoslav Draganovic: a Croatian priest and scholar, employed by the Red Cross and admired by Pius XII, who was deeply ...”

“... in the number of men, would any of these glorious chapters ever have been written?... The increase lay behind all the triumphs and catastrophes of a century.’ Remarkably, medical historians have had little to say about the history of man’s health. The reason, I would suggest, is not that they were uninterested: it is that they believed the explanations for ...”