“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Fleet Street proprietors who helped make Harold Wilson electable in the mid-Sixties. If Mr Major doesn’t watch out, their successors could easily do the same for John Smith in the mid Nineties. Why, the proprietor of the Sun and the News of the World may already be rummaging through his attic even as I write, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which was about to become a Soviet base – the so-called People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Major-General Strawson concludes his study and brings it up to date with brief chapters on the part played by the SAS in the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London and in the Falklands fighting. He prudently writes little about the SAS in Northern Ireland. What ...”

“... structural features of language and thought. And he also catalogues the various ways in which the major characters and ideas of the Antigone have been interpreted. The final third of the book attempts, by means of a partial and discursive commentary, to deepen our understanding of Sophocles’s text. Thus in Antigones a subtle, sensitive and uniquely learned ...”

“... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...”

“... who purchased 13-year-old girls for £5 in order to expose alleged wrong-doing (London, 1885 – John Pilger was using the same technique for the Daily Mirror in 1982); barons who lived on giant soundproof yachts (Pulitzer in 1907, Scripps in the 1920s); barons who helped start wars and stirred up riots; barons who drank a gallon of whisky every day and beat ...”

“... be forgiven for asking if the fame didn’t far outstrip the promise, and if his was rather less a major talent dissipated than a minor gift cleverly marketed. Taking the generous view of Capote’s talent and importance after the publication of his first book, Cyril Connolly predicted his martyrdom at the hands of a frightened and envious America. Capote’s ...”

“... brilliant dunce. Even if he did not have the ear of a close reader, he certainly did make and mark major changes to the tenor of English classical scholarship. Editions of classical texts by English scholars in the earlier 17th century were generally poor affairs, by continental standards. Thomas Farnaby, who edited Seneca’s plays, and ...”

“... belief of one kind or other. The last intense decade of war could have been expected to produce a major fictional recognition of the emotional appeal and social import of the ideological mode of thought, but it hasn’t. The TV series Homeland, which depicts a white American soldier as a Muslim convert and terrorist, seems to be alone in hinting, if ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”