“... part of the reason lies in its recent political history. Since the Sixties, there have been four major dramas in Latin America that have caught the attention of the world. Three of these were either by-passed or aborted, and the other took a peculiar form, in Brazil. Internationally, the continent became news for the first time in the wake of the Cuban ...”

“... in those areas, as well as the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, through her Lebanese puppet, Major Haddad, she occupies a small enclave in Southern Lebanon, having laid waste the surrounding country. The principle of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories has been accepted by virtually the whole world. Yet Israel has withdrawn only from the ...”

“... authorship must surely have been collective, the planning long-term and meticulous. The killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, or the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, are the two major vortices into which conspiracy theorists have been sucked in our own time, generating ever more elaborate ...”

“... widower, he now settled in England for good. He was painting as hard as ever. Brown’s first major picture was, like Work, in memory of the dead: it was to be ‘Elisabeth’s picture’. It had been planned with her, shaped by her love of English literature. From the first, poetry had provided the subjects of his painting. Elisabeth’s picture was ...”

“... Yet none of this stood in the way of his extraordinary prominence from 1931 to 1945. In a way, as John Strachey observed perceptively, ‘the unresolved themes that ran through his books, articles and speeches ... [were] his main strength. It was just this that gave him his hold over the minds of a whole generation of the British Labour Movement. After ...”

“... on the wall next to the bed. Back home, she initiates a correspondence under her pseudonym ‘John Ivy’, but the two never meet. Trewe kills himself, leaving a note in which he speaks of his yearning for the elusive woman of the dreams, the ‘imaginary woman’. Ella, too, pines away, and dies bearing the child she has conceived at Solentsea. Some ...”

“... gave ‘Reform’ MPs a defining political cause and a leader under whom they could rally: Lord John Russell, dubbed by Parry ‘the greatest Liberal statesman of his age’. Over the next forty years, the Whig-Liberal Party developed a distinct set of policies and, more importantly, an idiosyncratic approach to public life. As might have been expected from ...”

“... allowed to catch in 1988 ... Mr Clarke acknowledged that scientists don’t know whether or when major cod and haddock stocks will recover ... Robert Hache of the Association des Pêcheurs Professionels Acadiens said that the conclusions in the report are shocking even to fishermen used to declining stocks. ‘We see something that has never happened before ...”

“... heavily on such Western travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental ...”

“... Russians in Prague, Berlin and Paris. Almost overnight, Marina Tsvetaeva was recognised as a major literary figure. A poet of immense originality and versatility, in her mature work Tsvetaeva expanded the scope of Russian prosody and metrics. She had at her command an amazing range of poetic voices, dictions and styles which she used in her ...”

“... at home and for military defeat abroad. In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist ...”

“... in The Memory of War and in the sometimes, I thought, jejune poems of his collaboration with John Fuller, Partingtime Hall. The novelty in Manila Envelope is that nonsense and ‘light verse’ are yoked to the most harrowing material, and more rigorously than in Auden’s ‘Miss Gee’, for instance, which might otherwise seem a model, because the ...”

“... the wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman imports and rebuilds all the major English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight and opens up the island as a theme-park offering ‘Quality Leisure’ to wealthy American and Japanese tourists. Sir Jack, in the process, ends up rewriting English history, reproducing a new England in a ...”

“... odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who had once ...”

“... agitation for the advancement of women. She organised schemes for educational reform, and was the major benefactor of Girton College. ‘Education seems to me the only remedy,’ she once remarked. She was also a prolific and rather successful painter, and founded the Society of Female Artists. There was hardly a scheme for the furtherance of women’s ...”