“... Azerbaijani military forces began to gather in the area, and some over-enthusiastic soldiers took potshots at Karabakh Armenians. At around the same time, Russia appears to have told both the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments it had no intention of preventing Azerbaijan from finishing what it started in 2020.On 19 September Azerbaijani forces moved ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... of the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries, soon dispelled by Edmond Malone. (A pity Malone never took up Defoe as an object of study.) Of the next biographer, the authors simply say that Walter Wilson’s ‘claims to critical skill are really very modest’, an understatement on the grand scale. It is revealed of W.P. Trent, the most influential figure in ...”

“... books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare. It seemed run of the mill at the time, much like the other books in the library: it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist ...”

“... of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience. I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the ...”

“... are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up for a second book of psychogeography, describing their pilgrimages to the sites of poets’ deaths (but not their ...”

“... who did not want any more children, but these were entirely private and so have gone unrecorded. John Christopoulos has meticulously pieced together a secret history not only from prescriptive sources but from the public records of trials, giving us for the first time a sense of the way early modern women and men experienced abortion. Trials inevitably ...”

“... story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of ...”

“... individualism’. Hatch’s thesis is perhaps best exemplified by the Baptist preacher John Leland who, on New Year’s Day 1802, presented to the President, Thomas Jefferson, a 1235-pound cheese bearing the motto: ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ When Leland spoke before the Houses of Congress, he was described by one Congressman ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two ...”

“... feast for an analytical historian. For now, everything in Washington has narrowed to a saying of John Kennedy’s, uttered after the Bay of Pigs, to the effect that ‘success has many fathers – failure is an orphan.’ The debate in Congress, which was very protracted and in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the ...”

“... of notice. Her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, stops around the time of her marriage to John MacBride in 1902, when she was 36. (The queen in question is of course Cathleen ni Houlihan, not Victoria.) There are two biographies, by Samuel Levenson (1976) and Nancy Cadozo (1977), and, like the excellent notes and introductions in the present ...”

“... use his leg muscles again – ‘to tense the quadriceps’, to feel again that earlier power that took him to Norway, that took him to the bull. And it is gone. It’s being gone also allows Sacks to reconnect himself to his internal account of the history of neurology, since he has become a sufferer from Babinski’s ...”

“... as anything else about him. (The idea was already becoming familiar in the performing world, where John Barrymore, notably, had played out the end of his career surrounded by idiot-boards as an openly bog-eyed parody of his younger self.) It was in the Fifties, then, that America’s taste-makers finally stopped resisting the attractions of dissolution and ...”