“... no city should be so large that a man could not walk out of it in a morning. London, while by no means on a par with the megacities of the emergent East or Africa, still takes a very long day to egress on foot: if you leave at around 7 a.m., and are reasonably fit, you may find yourself in open fields late that evening. Following Connolly, what this says ...”

“... Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul. Wary of making the same ...”

“... as a ‘social democratic project … deep in Tory Buckinghamshire’ and wound up in 1992, which means the period of the town’s life as a state-driven experiment was perfectly bifurcated by the Thatcher election in 1979. Expected to house at least 150,000 transplants from overcrowded London, Milton Keynes’s south-eastern location and late start meant ...”

“... the lines of Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1992). As a comic extravaganza it salutes David Lodge, whose character Morris Zapp gets a walk-on part. But for Binet, riffing knowingly on narrative theory isn’t an end in itself. As well as being a kind of allegory, and an elaborate joke, his conspiracy plot is a way of arranging non-fictional events ...”

“... to Israel’s National Water Carrier. Israel declared that this would be an attack on one of its means of livelihood and would be construed as a threat to peace; the Arab scheme, they claimed, denied Israel’s right to exist. At the Alexandria Summit in September 1964, by which time Israel had already begun test pumpings on the first stage of the National ...”

“... of them – with severe respect. Better than anyone else, they know that a work of art means more than its creator intended it to mean, that artworks live what Montale called ‘the second life of art’ with their readers. But their criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... masculine sceptic while Mulder is the feminine believer. (What a man! I would exclaim as I watched David Duchovny in his little swimsuit. What a man!) It is not in the riverine quality of her voice, banked by reeds, sometimes pierced low by waterbirds. It is not even in her partner’s reaction, his one liquid larger pupil, the soft hopeless hope that he turns ...”

“... any memory of his existence’ and so changed her son’s name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel: ‘Hamel’ was the name of her next husband; she wanted to preserve the ‘J.D.’, but the Donald had to go. He’s only been known as ‘J.D. Vance’ – sometimes with dots, sometimes without – since 2014, when he changed his name to honour ...”

“... 25,000 British and Egyptian troops assembled with their modern guns and ten Nile gunboats. By no means everything went smoothly, in particular when the 21st Lancers were ambushed during a cavalry charge. Even so, Ronald Meiklejohn reflected that his troops ‘had taken part in one of the most spectacular – and perhaps “safest” – battles ever ...”

“... pen into the noisome ink of the Hollywood gossip-monger, until he himself stinks of the odours he means us to associate with the Kennedys. Wills leads us into the world of Presidential power by the back door. Mimicking a Norman Mailer or a Frank Sinatra, he creates a world of booze and balls and broads and brawls which seems to be as seductive to him as it ...”

“... knowing it. They are conjured into the midst of life to tell a modern truth by purely modern means. This is what a great artist has always known how to do, although usually not in such a wholly distinctive medium. Cartier-Bresson’s was photo-reportage, later to shift into portrait-photo-reportage, documentary film and photojournalism, all of this a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”