“... buttressed by an instinctive reaction against whatever line the current American Administration may take, that popular national movements towards democratic freedom in Eastern Europe are enemies of world peace. The corollary is that Solidarity is (was?) a particularly dangerous nuisance. ‘The good news is the crackdown in Poland,’ Ian Davidson wrote in ...”

“... boys, so many girls, at deliberately decided intervals. Even the disposing of infants, therefore, may not have been incompatible with maternal or parental affection, any more than inflicting punishment or hardship was. It all depends, as it always must, on the culture, the attitude, the situation at the time: on the family concerned, on the personality of ...”

“... he deplores her treatment of her husband and her son, but only so that we – he, primarily – may the more underline her monstrous behaviour to him, Joe. ‘Horrible, horrible woman. Poisonous. Corroded with jealousy and envy.’ The misogyny is unremitting; beside it, the misanthropy is light relief. Francis King’s introduction finds convenient a turn ...”

“... in the 19th century. If this was whig history it affected tories in quite the same way. The layman may well wonder why work should still be done on the history of Parliament, that olive whose oil has surely long since been pressed from its desiccated flesh. There have in fact been three distinguishable phases in modern historians’ treatment of the ...”

“... went abstract-dry. The two should come together again – in the novel. Why in the novel? ‘You may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie,’ says one of Iris Murdoch’s characters in An Accidental Man who is explaining why he has abandoned philosophy. It is always dangerous to impute a ...”

“... a goal but a method.’ ‘Chirac is a De Gaulle with no 18th of June, but available for a 13th of May.’ ‘Proliferation wrecks deterrence ... Indifference rules the world.’ ‘How many journalists,’ Mitterrand wonders, ‘have been killed in their first day on the battlefield of literature?’ Himself, he looks like a survivor: he could certainly earn ...”

“... of certain Protestant writers, and a Protestant, or Catholic, cast of mind, both of which may occur in people professing either, or neither, religion. The book also upheld the claims to Irishness of those whose Ireland, non-Gaelic or not, is every bit as valid as any other. Its aim, you might say, was the opposite of sectarian: yet the word ...”

“... so often did in the past, a strong representation of popes, kings and other powerful people. This may have been in part because Orvieto was part of the Papal States, but probably more important was the fact that the blessed and the damned are all shown naked and the same age. In accordance with theological doctrine they are all 33 years old, the age Christ ...”

“... from whom (in Italian) Languet sent Sidney in November 1573, hoping that ‘in admiring it you may perpetually gaze upon his eloquence and keep it before you as an example.’ ‘I have thoroughly read the delightful letter,’ Sidney responded dutifully (in Latin), ‘and picked some flowers from it, which I have imitated as I cannot easily better ...”

“... elderly victims. The myth of an ‘orderly’ British retreat became more difficult to sustain. It may also have become less necessary, as time has passed and we have come to acknowledge the darker side of British imperialism. Any school syllabus that left out the atrocities committed by the British would immediately be seen now as the propaganda such courses ...”

“... felt proud of their victory; which I suppose was to their credit. The other thing that may have banished it from our memories is that in the broader context of imperial history it seems so marginal – especially if you don’t know about those blackened corpses. It didn’t expand the area of the empire by very much: just the tiny island of Hong ...”

“... Economic Review in 2014, cheerfully conclude: ‘Decision-making ability, unlike preferences, may be justifiably manipulated.’ Just give the poor a bit of a nudge, and they’ll shape up.That was then. And as we now know, the libertarian paternalism of the Cameron and Obama governments gave us Brexit and Trump instead. As William Davies observes in ...”

“... to pieces. Many items show signs of wear, indicating that they were in use for a long time, and may have been family heirlooms, but there are also tong marks, indicating that pommels were wrenched off forcibly. Clear incisions on some of the pieces suggest that there was no great time gap between the disassembly and the burial, and it’s unlikely that ...”

“... nothing he does in this area will ever bear fruit and therefore his work can be safely ignored. It may be that a possible solution of one of the most important problems in mathematics is never investigated because no one likes the solution’s author.De Branges’s paper was slipped onto the internet without a fuss. Had he been any other mathematician, there ...”

“... future of the North Atlantic as a diverse, healthy ecosystem’, a recent survey tells us. ‘We may soon be left with only low-trophic-level species in the sea.’* In other words, if things continue as they are, North Atlantic fishes will be largely reduced to those species living on plants and phytoplankton. Even these ...”