“... racing. Every day when he got home from work I would go into his bedroom and sit with him while he read out from an evening paper the runners for the following day. Quite often we would all go racing on a Saturday, especially when there was a meeting at Kempton or Hurst Park or Windsor, and this was the one sort of family outing I always wholly ...”

“... were those of most reporters new to Vietnam: this was like no war we had ever covered, or even read about – if it was war at all, and not an armed demolition job. But I shared the perceptions of the time: there must be some higher intelligence, some plan directing all the furious energy; and, even if the design was less than perfect, the plan must ...”

“... the ‘inheritance of power’ that occurred with Bashar al-Assad’s succession in 2000. But Richard Cromwell seriously tried to liberalise the Protectorate; the army felt threatened and deposed him after nine months. Assad fell ill in 1983 and it seemed for a moment that his younger brother, Rifat, would take over, in what would have been an ...”

“... Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however infallible, will only go so far; while on ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an ...”

“... should take their destiny into their own hands and return to the land God had promised them. He read the Bible as history. He was horrified when the Zionist Congress of 1903 considered a proposal to resettle Jews in Uganda; only Palestine would do, and in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom the same year he began making his own plans for ...”

“... corrugated roof. Several women in the group approaching the tomb wear white T-shirts that read WE MISS YOU JOHN. One of them, no longer young, kneels in front of the grave, murmurs a prayer, then kisses the portrait before getting up, half in tears, to embrace her entourage; a young man behind her strikes up a Dinka song. The woman is Rebecca ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”

“... which, even as it referred to them, didn’t really refer to them. What does it feel like to read praise that is supposed to be about you but, in the very words it uses for you, reveals that it isn’t about you, not really, not wholly?How do you complete the following sentence: ‘Everyone misplaces ____ keys’? There is no way to do so that is both ...”

“... important, is exactly the sign Lubetkin and his collaborators wanted to draw. A sign that read ‘No council block must be just another council block’; a sign that read ‘This matters.’ He doubted even then whether it would be read. Towards the end of his life, he’d come to ...”

“... good to eat.’ Packets of biscuits were lying there and a giant heap of broccoli. Martin read out some of the labels: ‘Chicken and stuffing. Yorkshire pudding. Cashew nuts. Bananas. Three chicken pies. Yesterday.’ The lady in the claret hat came up to the door of the van to ask if we had any butter or bread. ‘Mince?’ asked ...”

“... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...”

“... metaphor par excellence – and pollute it in the name of humanity. A people will only survive, I read them as saying, if it embraces the stranger which it itself already is. There is of course a vital part of Jewish tradition in this: ‘For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ Although many of the writers at La Revue blanche, as well as its ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”