“... of former colleagues around to point out mis-statements or lacunae. Mind you, this convention may be changing: one can imagine the kind of history of the Times of the 1980s Rupert Murdoch would be likely to commission, or pass. It is hard to see him frightened by the prospect of hostile reviews: ‘Murdoch Loses Sleep over Bias ...”

“... Shawcross concentrated on international intervention, from the American bombing ordered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to the uses of international aid and sanctions during the Vietnamese occupation. Martin, on the other hand, has spent her career dissecting Cambodian society from within, always using a French historical framework. When she ...”

“... canonical works of black male autobiography that have surely shaped Gates’s political thinking, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Colored People is not an angry, still less an incendiary work; its predominant tone is nostalgic and ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”

“... a tactful intimation that some judges no longer find this appropriate. How has this come about? Richard II in 1396 enacted that ‘no lord nor other of the county, little or great, shall sit upon the bench with the justices to take assizes,’ evidently because local grandees were doing it and it wasn’t acceptable. I owe this information, let me say, not ...”

“... Hotel; and the St George, a smallish building on the waterfront, was ‘the jewel of Beirut’. Richard and Liz once had a suite; Kim Philby came to stay. Dizzying deals were sealed over handshakes in the bar. Timothy Leary stayed here with some Black Panthers during his Middle Eastern study tour of revolutionary movements. The late Marquess of Aberdeen, as ...”

“... its history, its complicated society, its internal dynamics and contradictions. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle said exactly that in 1996, when they were acting as consultants to Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign. That the Iraqis would be willing to accept more punishment from America, in addition to Saddam’s tyranny, on the off chance that they ...”

“... live – to seem to forget you – it is to feed my pain – and so that this seeming forgetting may spring forth more painfully in tears, at a given moment, in the midst of this life, when you appear to me in it * time – that body takes to obliterate itself in earth – (to merge little by little with neutral earth on the vast horizons) it is then that ...”

“... way. First, though, he wrote a tremendously bad novel called The Dwarves of Death (1990), which may be a source of embarrassment: there’s no book called ‘The Midgets of Mortality’ on Michael Owen’s fictional CV. The Dwarves of Death is definitely interested in pop music, demotic and storytelling, but it’s a throwaway effort that seems to have been ...”

“... of purpose. Such books were not always very attractive or even very interesting, though we may learn to miss them just because their elevation already seems old-fashioned. Last year, the prize’s new sponsors let it be known that it was time for a shiny new populism, and so far the judges have concurred. Neither prize-winner, under the new regime, has ...”

“... appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems ...”

“... served in a number of ministerial roles before losing his seat in 2019; and the attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, a barrister appointed from full-time practice at Matrix Chambers.The published list of ministerial appointments included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the king intended to confer on each a peerage for ...”

“... of Charles Hamilton and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over ...”

“... from extreme depression is something which we can reasonably believe. The word ‘depression’ may cause the reader to pause. We need, as it were, to shake ourselves in order to be clear in our minds that the richly learned word ‘melancholy’ could be used to refer to anything as simply distressing, as unglamorously desolate as depression. To be ...”

“... programmes are acceptably ‘scientific’. Here we come to the heart of the matter. Eysenck may well be right to say that the common image of the scientist is wrong. He and Sargent may also be right to say that parapsychology is not the only area of science which has been convicted of fraud. ‘Is all IQ testing ...”