“... to scare the Soviets into thinking that Nixon was ‘mad’ enough to start an atomic war. Reagan may have doubted his anti-Communist credentials, but Kissinger quickly accommodated himself to the New Right. ‘We all now turn to Ronald Reagan as the trustee of our hopes,’ he told the crowd at the 1980 nominating convention, which held him in only slightly ...”

“... the middle of the 19th century, clinical medicine had almost no beneficent impact on health and may well have caused more harm than good; doctors at the Battles of Gettysburg or the Wilderness had no more to offer wounded soldiers – except perhaps opium – than did their predecessors in the Persian or Punic Wars. As late as the Twenties there were only ...”

“... photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three main volumes of verse – and it is hard to see what other readers the editor could have looked for. Such a reader may finish this enjoyable collection of essays ...”

“... provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahidin guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it. In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter’s national security ...”

“... he had used when publishing his earliest poems: Incertus. How far back this mindset went we may never know, because, if Reid is correct, Heaney’s childhood letters have been lost. It is already visible in the opening letter of this selection, written to his schoolfriend Seamus Deane in December 1964, when they were in their mid-twenties. ‘Christmas ...”

“... the English ‘occluded’ Scotland because they regarded it as integral to the British project may be more attractive than historical because it draws on unionist assumptions she also wants us to resist. Most historians would say that Scotland was ignored as long as it was no threat to wealthier, populous England. Although Elizabeth enabled a series of ...”

“... places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less difficult. It may be said that it’s to do with German idealist philosophy, with political ...”

“... itself. Smollett’s translation of 1755, now reissued, pre-dated this capture, and perhaps it may be said that the translation assisted a romantic reading of Cervantes which it was also equipped to avert. His opinion of the work, expressed a little earlier in the Preface to Roderick Random, was ‘classical’ enough: Cervantes’ ‘inimitable piece of ...”

“... is at times an equivocal business. There’s always the question of what, exactly, of value they may tell us, of what there is that makes their publication more than merely intrusive. Forster lived a long time, and there’s some sorry reading in the second of these volumes. To Joe Ackerley in 1947 from the USA: ‘the view from the window is the Californian ...”

“... violent images all the time, on television, on the internet, in movies and in video games. We may encounter the videos inadvertently, watching the news for example, but they don’t drop from the sky. No one who sees them lives in a state of innocence. In film after film, TV show after TV show, the police are dogged, persistent, sometimes clever, always ...”

“... greatest film-maker than I did about ‘international cinema’ (or, at any rate, the movies of Robert Taylor, the Three Stooges, Francis the Talking Mule and Maria Montez). It was at the old Academy in Oxford Street, at the National Film Theatre, and at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, that, with mixed feelings of high elation and shame at my own previous ...”

“... the rest of the century. Two other recent publications, confronting the same facts, reflect and may reinforce the change of mood described above. Marmor, Mashaw and Harvey’s excellent book begins with the statement: ‘This book has a simple message: America’s social welfare efforts are taking a bum rap.’ They continue: ‘The vision of social welfare ...”

“... make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul.’ That at least we might have guessed, and how did the Master miss it? (Gassy? Chassis? Ecstacy? Or racy?) Not, of course, that there was anything of the clipped staccato of the Entre Deux Guerres about Frazer’s cadences and ...”

“... was good and original pedagogy to be droll. To be so on the subject of the extremely upper classes may seem less useful. They evidently caused him to suffer, to fear that they might think him common, or, nastiest of all their put-downs, middle-class. Betjeman was undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of ...”

“... uselessness as soon as the war started was curious, but Danchev withholds judgment. Others may not feel so well disposed. A chill wind blew over Liddell Hart’s reputation again just after the war, when he had recovered his spirits and, through the happy chance of a close relative being in charge of a nearby prisoner-of-war camp, had become acquainted ...”