“... Government turned when the Iran/Iraq War broke out in 1980. Trade was controlled under the Act by means of export control orders issued by government and policed by customs officers. It was quickly announced that no lethal weapons would be licensed for export to either side. Even in these early days, weaponry was thought more likely to be lethal in the hands ...”

“... to survive. Thousands burned to death, trapped below deck. Yet their lives at sea were by no means awful. They went to many countries, in East Asia, the Middle East, even South America, and they got to know some of the women who lived in those countries. Boredom bred a desire for a bacchanal, and the Sylhetis were just as motley and secular as their ...”

“... a level playing field of opportunities.’ We know, or think we know, more or less what the phrase means. It’s a way of saying that everyone should have a chance to compete on equal terms from the start, without things being tilted either against them or in their favour. But language carries its own histories, which come to bear without our intending or even ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... anarchy of capitalist society’ and called for a ‘socialist economy’ in which ‘means of production’ would be ‘utilised in a planned fashion’.None of us would say that sort of thing any more. Enthusiasm for comprehensive economic planning collapsed following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it had already been eroded by ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... that is, stirs up and excites – the postponement of the composite object ‘them’ means that the verb attains an absolute or intransitive force. This last is a common device in Pope. The total effect of this degree of interplay is to indicate that madness and poverty are very near allied. In Pope’s world of the Dunces, the Bedlamite and the ...”

“... all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

“... intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after the war Frank became for many of ...”

“... feared,’ McCann writes, ‘he was in danger of succumbing to self-parody.’ I see what McCann means in terms of his career, but I would have thought that Cary Grant, the same Cary Grant McCann portrays, made words like ‘self-caricature’ and ‘self-parody’ almost meaningless. Mimicry, and a certain distance from his self, was part of who Cary Grant ...”

“... both to deter and to negotiate, and to a delighted designer of posters gave the impression on a David Frost programme that if he were running the country, only Dad’s Army would stand between us and the Warsaw forces. Had it not been for defence, one old hand in the Party thought, the Tories might even have lost. But once more, helped by the continuing ...”

“... words, was ‘special’. In this context, Ceadel notes – but does not sufficiently heed – David Bebbington’s reminder that, for all their emphasis on a religion of the heart, evangelicals worked inside and not outside the Enlightenment rationalist tradition and so appealed to minds as well as hearts. What they shared across the denominations was ...”

“... 1727-1783 (1989). Politeness was to be the sign of gentility in a commercial society, and the means of achieving politeness were themselves increasingly commercial, as objects of taste in literature and the arts were marketed with growing sophistication. The consumer wanted to be treated politely. Among the nine works on the 18th century cited in the list ...”

“... as critical principles.’ But the pressure of literary theory seems particularly regrettable in David Lodge’s essay on Milan Kundera. Much of it is an interesting, useful account of The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Lodge thinks it necessary to spend several pages working out his notion that ‘the modernist novel is generally ...”