“... funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the ...”

“... IRA is not as intimate as the authors claim: Adams – as his series of urgent telephone calls to Washington seemed to show – appeared genuinely not to have known until a few hours before the Docklands bombing that the IRA was about to go back to war after their first ceasefire. And even if Adams is still in the IRA, how significant would this be for the ...”

“... Day 1667, it held out against Greenwich until 1884, when the International Meridian Conference in Washington, having been carefully lobbied, came down on the side of the British, a decision ignored by the French for navigational purposes up to the eve of the First World War. The map that caught Robb’s eye was drawn in 1763 and covered the central provinces ...”

“... Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous ...”

“... on. This was just one of the domestic surprises that came in the wake of 11 September. Another was Peter Mandelson’s strangely off-key suggestion that the secret services should be recruiting in Bradford rather than St James’s (apparently on the grounds that immigrants would find it easier than Old Etonians to disguise themselves as Islamic ...”

“... has shaken the assumptions that have underpinned economic and national security decision-making in Washington for the last thirty years.The change in circumstances has been dramatic. In 2001, after years of painful negotiation, the US managed China’s accession to the recently established World Trade Organisation, which sets the world’s trading rules. With ...”

“... magazine is as good as this one it hurts to throw old copies away. Visiting I.F. Stone once in Washington, I was impressed by his complete bound files of the New York Review of Books, and more impressed still that he had extracted these from the editor as part-payment. Perhaps contributors to the LRB could work the same trick on Karl Miller, who for this ...”

“... was my key writer when I came to edit Isis. I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces over such a short period as Jeremy wrote for Isis that summer. They always turned up on time, perfectly typed and at the right length. Their subjects included ...”

“... Ivan the Terrible had distributed land to his favourites (much to Stalin’s later approval); Peter the Great, by contrast, had abolished the private ownership of land; Catherine the Great had reintroduced it. At this point Linklater gets a little entangled in his own outline. He began with a more or less familiar Whiggish, Marxish version, in which ...”

“... and dissidents, partly thanks to the social isolation both groups suffered in Moscow. The Washington Post’s correspondent Peter Osnos would break ranks in 1977 and criticise the Western press for its uncritical support of the dissidents and inflation of their significance. But the courting of Western support never ...”

“... and Edwardians. But Wells adds that ‘there would be no killing, no lethal chambers’. Peter Morton in The Vital Science (1984) shows how Wells, following such precursors as Alfred Russel Wallace and Grant Allen, soon became the champion of a ‘social reformist eugenics’, looking to female emancipation, birth control and the Welfare State to ...”

“... audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt, who praised it in her newspaper column.We Will Never Die led Hecht to Zionism, or at least to one wing of it. The movement had split in the early 1920s, less than four years after the Balfour Declaration, when ...”

“... is light years on the go/From far away and takes light years arriving.’ Murray’s biographer, Peter Alexander, makes the striking claim that Murray had the poorest background of any English poet since Keats. Enough to bend anyone not double – which is a misnomer really – but half. One might as well go for an astronaut. And yet Heaney is ...”

“... House. He also played his part, recorded for admiring posterity by Norman Mailer, in the March on Washington, and was active in other anti-war demonstrations. He exerted himself for Eugene McCarthy in his presidential campaign, and enjoyed it without expecting to have much effect on the result. His poems are strongly affected by contemporary history as well ...”

“... There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a patronising amateur. ‘Socially,’ Odom said, ‘I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass.’ Kissinger, cross with Edward Heath, actually suspended intelligence ...”