“... his way immediately to Iseult’s house. She was later arrested for harbouring him briefly and held for a month before being found not guilty. By the time Fisk’s book came out I was no longer seeing much of Francis and Madeleine. In 1982, we had printed a letter about Stuart’s column which accused him of having been a Nazi supporter. On the morning In ...”

“... but was forever, you were close to it and it to you … Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!’For David Craig in the early 1970s, Sunset Song was one of a ‘cluster’ of ‘absolutely outstanding … novels of peasant crisis’ published in the 1930s, with Sholokhov his index, plus Steinbeck, plus Silone: ‘It has a wholeness … based on the rhythm of ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... by something squalid that squats ‘lookin’ up at ’im, you see’. But he dies a vertical man, held upright by some obscure passionate intensity, almost a principle. The only function of the other figure is to look up to this dreadful but memorable intensity. To identify him (let alone her, let alone to make the body that of Mrs Bathurst) will only ...”

“... administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the agenda, where it was overwhelmingly ...”

“... in the 1960s a fighter in the underground against the military dictatorship, who had never held or run for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to victory with a 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s ...”

“... pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large ...”

“... in – ‘a random bundle of information,’ as Rusbridger puts it of the pre-digital Guardian, ‘held together by the glue of appearing in the same printed package’. When Rupert Murdoch tried to paywall the Sun, the readers wouldn’t cough up. But​ what if you didn’t put up a paywall? What you lost in revenue, you would, in theory, gain as a ...”

“... and Austro-Hungarian did not, that was because Bolshevik internationalism, which was genuine, held it together. Under Stalin, however the logic of an imperial space controlled from Moscow took over, and an earlier Ukrainian nationalism, never general but equally never extinguished, came to acquire a new intensity, becoming more anti-Russian than, say ...”

“... LEAs were never compelled to turn their schools into comprehensives, only a few (like Kent) held out, and there was little sign of widespread opposition to the change. The comprehensives, however, simplified the system without solving the problem. The Labour Party had no clear idea how the schools should be organised: whether, for example, children ...”

“... trade often enough for the correlation of their prices to be measured: most investors simply held them until they matured. Intuitively, though, it seemed conceivable that defaults in bundles of mortgages or other forms of consumer debt could be quite highly correlated, because of the likely influence of factors such as the overall unemployment level, and ...”

“... I take a turn for the worse. No human dignity is left; in a red dawn, I stagger across the room, held by a tiny Filipina nurse, my heart hammering, unspeakable fluids pouring from me. Hours later, when my heart has subsided and I am propped up and reading the Observer, I think this moment is still happening, still being enacted; I live in two simultaneous ...”

“... old man had once been La Zambinella, and that the fortune of the household in which the party was held came from La Zambinella’s earnings as a castrato much in demand. Martha Feldman’s The Castrato, rich in scholarship and filled with subtle analysis, is one of several books that have appeared on the subject of castrati in recent years. In The Queen’s ...”