“... but have not yet arrived at the perfection of putting it on the right way,’ he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse of his duties in March 1820, adding: ‘Nobody has been stabbed this winter.’ Things were different the following winter. After the Guicciolis’ separation, Byron grew close to Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba, who were key figures in the Romagna ...”

“... strategic in background. Decisive for the evolution of common European institutions were four major bargains between Paris and Bonn. The first of these was the Schuman Plan of 1950, which created the original Coal and Steel Community. The local problems of French siderurgy, dependent on Rhenish coal for its supply of coke, was one element in the inception ...”

“... know how to describe her succinctly. About the most one might say is that she was a Big Deal – a Major Muckety-Muck, a Regular Somebody-or-Other – in literary and artistic society in New York, London and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Which isn’t on the face of it to say a lot. Though superbly gifted she left no obvious or tangible legacy. (Cohen ...”

“... attempt at a takeover. The would-be junta seems simply to have assumed that if the chief of each major institution was squared, orders would be automatically followed downwards – the obedience of the organised clinching the apathy of the disorganised. But the new political class in the Soviet Union today is not confined to the area of leaders and ...”

“... and ascribed in part to the influence of Burke, ‘the use of spies and informers’ by John Reeves and the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. A mostly sceptical reader of Burke’s anti-revolutionary writings of the mid-1790s, Gillray cared enough for his Letter to a Noble Lord to pay it the homage of ...”

“... to keep his hands clean. Moreover, and odder still, Shakespeare took his name, Oldcastle, from a major source for the comic side of his play, the rambling and formless but not lifeless chronicle drama called The Famous Victories of Henry V, where the knight Oldcastle is one of the small group of companions of the wild young Prince.Shakespeare created ...”

“... of theatre productions ever since. I think myself that Hamlet exists; that Shakespeare’s first major tragedy has through all its forms a character so definite as to constitute something real and singular. Certainly, an event hit the English stage for the first time around 1600 that not only revolutionised revenge drama but made a difference to a powerful ...”

“... compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... concert or a football match, talked to a cab driver, or met anyone lowlier than a full professor, major writer or government minister. By casting his memoir as a series of reports by a peripatetic academic, Stern can also skate over the question that haunts this book: what does it mean for him to be Jewish, and what historical lessons, if any, might one draw ...”

“... of a detached observer who’s finally moved to moral action. He’s also Jewish, and ‘the only major event he had not succeeded in photographing was the extermination of his family in Poland.’ ‘There should have been a Jew with Morel since the beginning,’ another character thinks. ‘Preferably a survivor of the German gas chambers.’ Minna thinks ...”

“... existence under such titles as ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ and ‘What Makes a Life Significant’.John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle’s book is an anthology of these writings, from a letter James wrote when at Harvard Medical School in the 1860s to ‘A Pluralistic Mystic’, an argument against rationalising away mystical experiences that was published in ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”