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“... and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor of the difference engine; in Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron; in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s monster’s creator; in everyone’s connections and ...”

“... critically important to a celebrated generation of Northern Irish poets, poets like Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Muldoon. These writers were led to him by content but stayed for the style. Auden or Eliot’s influence can be overwhelming for a writer, their tone is so settled, their territory staked out so thoroughly. But a novice poet can wander around ...”

“... by drugs and guerrillas. Our moral or intellectual engagement with conflict abroad is also, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, ‘notoriously selective and partial’. Colombia does not appear to be strategic. Certainly, for most of its independent history it has not been so. One disdainful late 19th-century Foreign Office note on a despatch from Bogotá ...”

“... of The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Ilan Pappé, Yossi Amitai, Uri Bar-Joseph, Michael Cohen and Uri Milstein. In 1948 and After Morris wrote of his generation of Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973 and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the ...”

“... music from a hundred feet above their nests among the bents. Catherine’s lyric, a blessing on a young woman ready for marriage, begins: I bathe your palms In showers of wine, In purifying fire, In the seven elements, In the juice of raspberries, In the milky honey, And I call the nine pure choice graces Into your fair fond face … There’s almost ...”

“... he wrote to Michel Strauss, a student at Harvard: Hungary is a very romantic cause; all sorts of young men want to go there and die for liberty, although plainly they cannot be of any use now that the Russians have crushed the resistance. But they very properly feel that something must be done, that awful things are happening, that one cannot be supine, and ...”

“... writings and practices, which … academics deem … taboo’. In his essay on Knight, Michael Taylor quotes the critic on the political theology that lay behind his poses – the thought that ‘the religious importance of literature’ should be proclaimed ‘in a voice of authority’ – and concludes that this phrase can be used to ‘sum up ...”

“... over it effectively ceased to exist. It is true that individual politicians like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will be pursued by some of their referendum pledges for as long as they are part of a government tasked with delivering on the result. But they have the advantage of being able to claim that the voters should judge them on their record in office, not ...”

“... and passing a building site I slowed down to protect my eyes from the likelihood of grit. A young Roscommon boy asked, ‘Are you happy?’‘Not very,’ I said.He beamed at hearing a fellow countrywoman.‘Any chance of tea at four?’‘No chance,’ I said (I had to be somewhere).‘You won’t forget us, will you?’ he said.‘I won’t,’ I ...”

“... to get back in. A nightmare, my own: to be locked in a dark, stuffy nursery cupboard with Boris, Michael, Nigel and their pals. England will become a place the young want to get out of, in search of fresh air and light.James ButlerThere is​ now a knot at the centre of British politics. If politicians push for inclusion ...”

“... figure in his forties. He explained that as a police chaplain he had come across a number of young people in detention and had offered them what he called ‘my spiritual services’. They had doubts, they had problems, they had fears, he said with the utmost gravity. When asked about their physical state, he said that he had only considered their ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of hands and a fresh colour. 3) He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good colour. 4) He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy. 5) And so he grew up like an oak. He had strong hands, a good colour. 6) And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong ...”

“... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...”

“... inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real ...”