“... need for such a settlement to counter the Soviet threat. Begin was unmoved, saying that he might grant limited government on the West Bank and that its inhabitants could choose between Israeli and Jordanian citizenship, but that he would never concede a Palestinian state. In response, Thatcher pointed out that if the West Bank Palestinians became Israelis ...”

“... Michi was nobody is certain: a forgotten manager, an outsider, one of the chori or colonos called Michael? The other surviving settlements in the Perené Colony, Pampa Silva and Pampa Whaley, are also named after dead functionaries. In the version we hear from some of those who laboured on the plantation, all three bosses were killed by indigenous people. But ...”

“... to become the saviour of his country. We have since been told, in the memoirs of Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, that there was quite a lot of loose talk in the officers’ mess in those days, about taking Britain by the scruff of the neck and generally cleaning things up. The public face of this sinister idiocy was represented by blimpish figures of fun ...”

“... manuscripts to do with the Society, were edited by Mary Thale and published twenty years ago. Now Michael Davis has collected and edited all the many publications of the LCS. They fill four large volumes, to which Davis has added a volume of contemporary pamphlets, mainly by its supporters, and a further volume of Parliamentary debates and Government reports ...”

“... will raise nowhere near enough to undo the damage done by George Osborne’s cuts to the central grant, to be continued by Rishi Sunak. Notoriously, too, the more red-blooded Tories are prepared to let declining cities and regions go on declining. In 1981, Hoppit reminds us, the Thatcher government privately considered allowing Liverpool to wither, rather ...”

“... as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside ...”

“... so moveable, that one can pin it down no more closely than by calling it ‘anti-establishment’. Michael Frayn may have excoriated that phrase – in his brief, brilliant introduction to the published text, Beyond the Fringe, in 1963 – as denoting ‘a spacious vacancy of thought’, but really, I don’t see how we can do any better. Any real ...”

“... to the understanding of diabetes, he turns naturally to the life and contribution of Dr Frederick Grant Banting, who enrolled as a medical student in 1912 in one of North America’s largest medical schools – in the University of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. Bliss says he was a tall and handsome young man who spent much of his spare time with his ...”

“... at all. The vision quickly faded. Gorbachev demanded an end to SDI testing, Reagan would not grant it, and the opportunity was lost. Nor is it clear, even if they had agreed, that the two leaders could have sold the idea of abolition to their own and allied governments – Mrs Thatcher was particularly scathing. But as Jonathan Schell points out in The ...”

“... the former screenwriter Dori Carter’s potboiler Beautiful Wasps Having Sex, to studies such as Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.) Hollywood is captive to its own mythological origins. Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own sees it as the Jewish invention of a ‘shadow America’, an idealised vision of ...”

“... rather than economics the matrix of social facts’. Both sociologists and theologians grant religion priority; it is just that the latter believe in it while the former do not. Sociology rejects eternal verities, yet what else is involved in the positivist conception of science? Transcendence is discredited, yet the idea of the social or cultural ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... assumptions of their times. Sayers adds social and cultural snobbery to a conservative feminism; Michael Innes ties a display of interest in neoclassical art, literature and architecture to one in dreams, nightmare and the grotesque; Margery Allingham’s deep love of a semi-fictional and fast disappearing way of life in rural Suffolk and Essex is ...”

“... to the newspapers attacked the influx of Jews, others also came to their defence, most notably Michael Davitt, the leader of the Land League. ‘The Jews have never to my knowledge done any injury to Ireland,’ he wrote in a letter to the Freeman’s Journal in 1893. ‘Like our own race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever ...”